As of July 24th 2024, the day of the 4th annual Litecoin Summit, the Litecoin network is approaching its 13th year of existence. For nearly 13 years, it operated without interruption and reliably allowed anyone around the world to make fast, secure, affordable, and provably decentralized financial transactions.

Litecoin was born in the middle of the bear market that lasted between 2011 and 2013, so it’s no stranger to hard times: it was forged through fire, became the silver steel of a burgeoning industry, and went on to witness three more brutal bear markets. In between these moments of grief, which separated fundamentals from exuberance and inspired more improvements, there were glimpses of victory when Litecoin users felt like they were at the top of the world. But regardless of the price action, LTC was constantly used for payments — so the speculative side took the back seat to enable the medium of exchange to flourish.

Other coins came and went: they rose to prominence, had their moments in the spotlight, and then faded into obscurity never to recover. During this process, traders used Litecoin to get on and off exchanges — they leveraged the low fees, fast confirmation times, great transaction finality, and wide acceptance across exchanges in order to speculate on the new star. Sure, Bitcoin (and later Ethereum) were registering much higher transaction volumes. But when the fees became high, most traders came back to the good old Litecoin.

Over the years, sovereign individuals trying to live off of their cryptocurrency holdings would also benefit from Litecoin. Due to its similarity in design with Bitcoin, almost every BTC ATM offers the option to also buy and sell LTC. Furthermore, companies such as Bitrefill allow anyone to buy gift cards for popular stores, restaurants, hotels, and transportation networks using Litecoin. In the United States, Bitrefill even allows people to pay their bills with their LTC. This description barely scratches the surface, though: payments processors such as BitPay have thousands of integrations across businesses from all sectors, thus allowing Litecoin users to spend for virtually everything they may desire.

Even in Paralelni Polis, the first Bitcoin cafe in Prague, Litecoin is one of the only three forms of currency accepted (alongside Bitcoin and Monero). Speaking of Prague, the largest retail store in Czech Republic (Alza, the national equivalent of Amazon) accepts LTC payments for all of their products — through a European payments processor called Confirmo (formerly Bitcoin Pay, established in 2014). Therefore, it’s safe to say that Litecoin’s success in commerce is not only a North American affair that’s mostly driven by businessmen such as Jon Moore and John Kim, or celebrities like Ben Askren. There’s genuine organic growth that happened across 13 years and nobody can deny the proof of work behind it. Everyone who sought to avoid the banking system and needed fast settlement times and low fees could rely on the Litecoin network.

In 2014, three years into Litecoin’s existence, the silver surfer has gained a new canine friend: as Dogecoin was facing the brutal reality of potential 51% attacks, Litecoin took it under under its Scrypt wing to allow the most popular Shiba Inu in finance to wave its tail and bark for as long as it pleases. The Doge didn’t have a particularly prolific market performance until early 2021, when Elon Musk adopted him. Ever since that moment, Dogecoin has remained a solid contender to the top 10 coins and has also played a major role in keeping Litecoin miners profitable: since they can merge mine both LTC and DOGE, the revenue for the Proof of Work they provide is more significant and void of concerns. Litecoin saved Dogecoin, and then the king of shibes came back 7 years later to prove that he’s much more than a good boy: he’s the wow much coin.

Litecoin’s journey was not without criticism and scrutiny: as bitcoiners converged towards currency and protocol maximalism, some of them referred to Litecoin as a cheap and pointless carbon copy. After the Lightning network and sidechains emerged on Bitcoin, it was said that altcoins such as LTC would die off. And when new and better marketed coins such as Terra Luna and Solana reached their peak, VCs like Mike Novogratz suggested that LTC should be removed from CNBC’s price ticker. All of these opinions were proved wrong for different reasons.

Firstly, Litecoin was never just another carbon copy. There are multiple reasons why Litecoin survived for 13 years and continues to thrive, while nobody speaks of the other 2011 stars Peercoin, Namecoin, Terracoin, Devcoin, and Novocoin: it had a fair launch, the code was constantly maintained, and a community grew organically around it. Also, Charlie Lee coined (pun intended) one of the most memorable and lasting narratives in the space: Litecoin is the digital silver to Bitcoin’s gold. While Namecoin was more different from a technological point of view, it didn’t have such a powerful meme attached to it and the market action did not follow it.

Secondly, Litecoin has constantly played the role of a Bitcoin testnet with real incentives. While testnets are useful for developers, they are not made for demonstrating market demand and they don’t attract hackers to try to break the code. Back in early 2017, when SegWit FUD was at its peak and critics would make ridiculous claims about its security (”SegWit coins are anyone-can-spend”), Charlie Lee negotiated activation with the Litecoin miners in order to prove the mightiness of Bitcoin’s proposal. So Litecoin’s activation of SegWit came in late April, almost 4 months before Bitcoin’s. To prove the haters wrong, Reddit user throwaway40338210716 even set up a SegWit address with 40000 LTC in it (the equivalent of $1 million in early May 2017). Though the coins were moved to a different wallet in September of the same year, there was never any report of stolen coins or any complaint from the litecoiner. By that time, Bitcoin had also activated the exact same piece of code via soft fork. Plot twist: Charlie Lee revealed in October 2017 that it was him who set the bounty, then moved the LTC to another wallet when his demonstration was no longer necessary.

After the SegWit activation, companies such as ACINQ and Lightning Labs started experimenting on Litecoin. They knew that some mistakes were potentially too expensive to make on Bitcoin, so they used a chain that’s 100% compatible and enables developers to port their code whenever it’s provably safe and ready. This is why the first mainnet Lightning network transactions were broadcast on Litecoin and it took a few months for the exact same developments to come to Bitcoin. At the time, part of the vision for the Lightning network was to build atomic swap platforms between blockchains so users could trade between BTC, LTC, and other LN-compatible chains without middlemen and by using protocols instead of businesses. Though there were some experiments, this idea never came to fruition… but maybe it was just a little too ambitious for its time.

Litecoin didn’t really need SegWit and Lightning, as the base layer fees have always been low and the network never experienced significant congestion. However, Bitcoin did need them — so Litecoin took on the role of the live testnet with incentives and arguably played a historical part in helping users make up their mind about groundbreaking (but heavily criticized) developments. There’s a lot of value in having financial bounties for new code, but some people take everything for granted: there’s an entire roster of toxic Bitcoin maximalists who will argue that Litecoin is worthless and would most likely share this article across social media to call the author names such as ”shitcoiner” and ”grifter”.

But as always, dogmas are rarely rooted in reality and the free market tends to always destroy narratives. The only reply that someone like Francis Pouliot, Saifedean Ammous, or Giacomo Zucco would give is that ”these coins only exist to fuel gambling and speculation, while a bunch of degenerates print their own money outside of the sacred 21 million to generate inflation”. But in the year of 2024, Bitcoin still doesn’t have a simple and non-custodial solution for people who can’t afford to pay high on-chain fees.

Are you using Liquid with L-BTC? Good luck spending that anywhere… you’re also going to need permission from the federation members to peg out (or else pay a percentage of the amount to a swapping service). Using custodial Lightning or ecash mints? Hopefully, the custodians will have mercy and never steal your funds in some epic rug pull (or the regulators won’t seize their money). To this day, there are more ATMs, exchanges, and brick and mortar businesses which accept Litecoin (albeit, through payments processors) than Bitcoin on Lightning. This phenomenon doesn’t happen because these businesses don’t adhere to the Bitcoin maximalist thesis and therefore don’t want to support Bitcoin’s second layers — it’s a matter of supply and demand, and Litecoin is here to deliver. The reality is that, as of July 2024, Bitcoin is still struggling with scaling and must implement better proposals for layer 2s.

Last but not least, it’s worth noting that Litecoin is a forward-looking project. After activating SegWit and providing an excellent testbed for the Lightning Network, the developers didn’t just rest on their laurels. They went back to work in 2018, in an attempt to give Litecoin the last missing property of sound money: fungibility. What started as a research to bring Confidential Transactions to Litecoin and grew into a potential collaboration with privacy coin Beam, eventually became MWEB: the marriage between Grin++ (one of the most popular implementations of the MimbleWimble protocol, written in C++) and Extension Blocks (a 2013 proposal by Bitcoin Core developer Johnson Lau, which sought to increase the block size without a hard fork).

To say that MWEB is a big deal is an understatement: through it, Litecoin has added a protocol-level way to get privacy for the sender, the receiver, and the amounts being sent. Furthermore, the upgrade doubles down as a block size increase which future-proofs the network for times of much higher demand… while once again showing the Bitcoin community how it’s done. While it’s true that MimbleWimble isn’t the best of privacy protocols and isn’t recommended for darkweb markets, it can receive further improvements through voluntary CoinJoins from users.

MWEB is definitely the future of Litecoin and the feature from which many killer apps can flourish. It’s a bold move which marks a slight diver sion from the Bitcoin path, but also a big step into the future.

And it’s not like the improvements will end with MimbleWimble: as Charlie Lee hinted on S15 E34 of the Bitcoin Takeover podcast, Drivechains might be coming next to enable the creation of a sidechain for every popular use case. If this proposal gets activated, then everything from Ethereum contracts to Monero ring signatures can get ported 1:1 to be traded for LTC. While there’s no guarantee that these miner-enforced sidechains will get traction, the research is certainly useful to once again combat some FUD. It might also increase the demand for LTC.

Such is a fate of Litecoin: not designed to directly compete, but to support Bitcoin in ways that are not possible on the mother chain or its valueless testnets. If there’s anything that’s too controversial and ahead of its time for Bitcoin, Litecoin can try it first and report the results. Certainly, this role is valuable and brings many benefits to the space. And to all the pioneers who stick around and support this mission: I salute you!

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