Litecoin (LTC) has grown in several ways in recent months and is making a lot of headlines. The reason is the upcoming halving which is now less than a month away.
From the beginning of the year to date, LTC has almost quadrupled its value, going from $30 in January 2019 to the current $120 after having touched $145 thanks to the growth of BTC and several positive news, such as the arrival of the debit card and the support from Flexa.
The hashrate has also tripled from 150 Thash/s at the end of 2018 to the current 450 Thash/s. This has led to an increase in difficulty which, as happened with bitcoin recently, has reached values never seen before.
Litecoin (LTC), upcoming halving
The fact that Litecoin’s halving is highly anticipated is also confirmed by data from Google Trends. According to the well-known search engine, Google searches for the term Litecoin and Halving have been growing steadily for several weeks now.
Halving consists in reducing the reward for miners and, while the next halving of Bitcoin is scheduled for May 2020, Litecoin is scheduled for August 5th of this year. That means there are only 28 days left. According to Litecoinblockhalf‘s estimates, the halving will take place at 13:48:48 on August 5th at the 1,680,000th block.
Initially halving was expected by the end of August but the increase in hashrate has led to an increase in mined blocks and, as a result, the reward-drop will take place sooner. Currently, there are just over 16,000 blocks missing and one block is mined on average every 2.5 minutes: approximately 576 blocks are mined per day.
This cyclical process occurs every 840,000 blocks and the last halving took place on August 25th, 2015 without any problems. Three years ago LTC grew 400% in the month before halving from $1.70 to $8.50.
