Litecoin’s hashrate reached a new low after the halving in August 2019.
Indeed, the highest peak ever was reached in mid-July 2019, with over 500 Thash/s, but since then, probably due to the halving, it has started to fall.
Already at the end of September, it dropped below 300 and then fell to 130 in December.
Since then though, it has continued to fall, with the minimum level of 127 reached on March 16th, 2020.
To find a similar figure we need to go back in time to February 2018, when there was a first downturn after the surge due to the speculative bubble at the end of 2017.
Note that, in the same time interval, Bitcoin’s hashrate evolved in a totally different way, but there is one thing in common: the pre-halving surge.
In fact, as of December 2018, Litecoin’s hashrate increased by 220% until a few days before the halving and then collapsed by over 70% in the post-halving months.
Bitcoin’s hashrate increased by almost 200% from December 2018 until October 2019, then stopped again, and then increased again by another 30% up again to the new peak at the beginning of March 2020.
Overall, from December 2018 to the highest peak, it increased by 280%, and then decreased by 24% in the following days, also due to the collapse of BTC’s price.
Bitcoin’s halving is expected in May 2020, so its hashrate could increase further in the coming weeks, if prices allow it.
What happened to Litecoin is a real collapse in mining profitability.
After an incredible peak of $98 per day per GHash/s reached in July 2017, profitability plummeted to about $2.5 in late 2018, rising to $5 a few weeks before the 2019 halving.
Since then it has plummeted again to $1.2, and this most likely caused the hashrate to collapse.
The path followed by Bitcoin’s mining profitability has been similar in some ways, with a peak of $3.7 per day per THash/s reached in December 2018, and then plunged below $0.08 in the last few days.
Note that Litecoin’s mining profitability, calculated in dollars per day for THash/s, is ten thousand times higher than Bitcoin’s because $1.2 per day per GHash/s actually corresponds to $1,200 per day per THash/s since 1 THash/s corresponds to 1,000 GHash/s.
Despite this, Bitcoin’s hashrate is still almost a thousand times higher than Litecoin’s, which shows that miners’ interest in Bitcoin is enormously higher than their interest in Litecoin.
Finally, it should be noted that the collapse of Litecoin’s hashrate did not in any way affect the performance of its blockchain, as block-time remained unchanged.