The Defiant

Litecoin Transactions Up 500% On LTC-20 Token Hype

Speculation On Ordinals Has Moved Beyond Bitcoin

By: Samuel Haig Loading...

Litecoin Transactions Up 500% On LTC-20 Token Hype

Activity on the Litecoin blockchain has surged to an all-time high after the veteran network launched the LTC-20 token standard.

The network processed 585,000 transactions in 24 hours, rocketing 500% in one week and beating its previous record of 225,000 from January 2018, according to BitInfoCharts. The surge in activity coincided with new highs in the number of active LTC addresses and newly created LTC addresses on the same day.

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Litecoin Transactions

Daily social media engagements with Litecoin are also up 220% at 35M, according to LunarCrush.

Fungible Tokens

The LTC-20 token standard was inspired by the recent explosive success of Bitcoin’s BRC-20 token standard, with BRC-20 tokens now representing a $663M market cap two months after launching. Bitcoin’s on-chain transactions soared to a record high of 682,000 on May 1.

DeFi veterans may be wondering what the current hype surrounding fungible tokens on Proof of Work chains is all about. The ERC-20 token standard on Ethereum is nearly eight years old and was responsible for popularizing fungible tokens and paving the way for the ICO and DeFi booms that underpinned previous crypto bull cycles.

Litecoin was forked from Bitcoin in 2011, then comprising the second Proof of Work cryptocurrency deployed. For many years, the network found value as a testing ground for upgrades slated for deployment on Bitcoin.

Despite the network receding in usage during recent years, Litecoin is the 14th largest crypto asset with a $645M market capitalization, according to CoinGecko.

LTC-20 Standard

The LTC-20 Gitbook describes the standard as a “fun experiment” in creating “worthless” fungible tokens using ordinal theory.

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Ordinals are NFT-like assets that leverage Bitcoin’s Segwit and Taproot upgrades to inscribe data, including text, images, and video in on-chain data. The BTC-20 and LTC-20 token standards leverage ordinals to create fungible assets.

Users can create, mint, and transfer LTC-20 tokens. According to Colin Wu, 850 LTC-20 tokens have been created, but most are not yet mintable.

“[LTC-20] by no means should be considered THE standard for fungibility on Litecoin with ordinals,” its standard’s author wrote. “[I] encourage the Litecoin community to tinker with standard designs and optimizations until a general consensus on best practices is met (or to decide that this is a bad idea altogether!)”

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