Litecoin
KLEAR3 ResearchPublished Updated
LTCLitecoin, a direct fork of Bitcoin's own code launched on 2011-10-07 by Charlie Lee, has published its repository since June 2012. Its cap is not 84 million but 83,999,999.908, the same rounding-down halving as Bitcoin's. Its privacy layer, MWEB, suffered a real exploit in April 2026.
What does Litecoin actually do?
Litecoin is a direct fork of Bitcoin’s own code, changed in three places: a different hashing puzzle, blocks four times faster, and a cap near 84 million coins rather than 21 million. It settles payments the way Bitcoin does, just quicker and without needing the same mining hardware, at least at first.
The repository is literally descended from Bitcoin Core: the file that enforces the rules of money creation still opens with a copyright line naming Satoshi Nakamoto. What Charlie Lee changed in 2011 was the proof-of-work puzzle, swapped for Scrypt, a hashing function built to resist specialised mining chips, the kind Bitcoin mining had started to attract. It did, for a while; Scrypt mining hardware exists today too.
Everything downstream of that one change had to move with it. Faster hashing meant Bitcoin's ten-minute block target drop to 150 seconds, four times quicker, and every constant tuned to that rhythm had to scale with it, by the same factor, to keep the same economics running on a faster clock.
One addition is not inherited: MWEB, a sidechain that lets a transaction hide its amount and its parties. It is covered on its own further down, because it is also where the one real security incident this page documents took place.
Source GitHub, read 2026-10-08
Is the code actually open?
Yes, under the same MIT licence Bitcoin uses, and the repository has shipped 23 versions since 2012. Twenty-six commits landed in the last 90 days, every one of them from a single identity: the author of the privacy feature that was exploited in April 2026 and patched the next day.
Twenty-three tagged releases is a modest pace for fourteen years of history, and it understates the work: most of what keeps a fork like this alive is quietly pulling in changes from Bitcoin itself, which does not always need a release of its own to matter.
Source GitHub, read 2026-10-08
One firm has reviewed part of this code, not all of it. Quarkslab audited the MimbleWimble sidechain in 2022; the payment logic Litecoin inherited from Bitcoin has never had a dedicated report of its own, and relies on the same fifteen years of public scrutiny Bitcoin does.
Source Quarkslab, read 2026-10-08
Is anyone still working on it?
More than it looks, and from one person. The repository took 26 commits over the 90 days to 8 October 2026, every one signed by David Burkett, the engineer behind Litecoin’s privacy layer. A second branch, 24.x, explains a push that looked newer than the work on the main line.
One identity for every commit in three months sounds thin for a top 25 network, and it is worth naming rather than hiding: David Burkett wrote the four proposals that put MWEB into the protocol, and most of what he is still pushing is its upkeep.
The repository's own pushed_at field read a day later than the newest commit on master, which could look like a stalled project measured from the wrong angle. It was not: a separate branch, 24.x, received a commit and a push at that exact minute. Two lines of development are running side by side, not one that has gone quiet.
Source GitHub, read 2026-10-08
What shows it is running
- The network answers — block 3,191,486
- The repository is still being worked on — 26 commits over the 90 days to 2026-10-08, 1 distinct Git identity
Source BlockCypher · GitHub, read 2026-10-08
- The Litecoin network starts
- The repository goes public on GitHub
- MWEB privacy sidechain ships, live support
- The MWEB exploit is patched
Where does it actually run?
On one network, its own, which we checked directly: a public node returned block 3 191 486 on 8 October 2026. Litecoin has never been issued anywhere else, unlike the wrapped versions of Bitcoin that circulate on other chains. Its own privacy sidechain, MWEB, is a separate story, not a separate network.
A single chain means a single place to watch. There is no bridge contract to drain and no second issuer to lose track of: whatever happens to LTC happens on this one ledger, which is also why the April 2026 incident mattered as much as it did, there was nowhere else for the problem to hide.
Source BlockCypher, read 2026-10-08
Network verified by reading its current block height on a public node.
What the coin actually does
It pays for block space and the miner who adds the block, nothing else. There is no company, no team allocation, and no unlock schedule: the only way new LTC appears is as a mining reward on a schedule fixed in the code, now within one halving of Bitcoin’s own cadence.
The schedule is three numbers. A block pays 50 coins, that reward halves every 840,000blocks, four times Bitcoin's interval for blocks four times faster, which lands on the same roughly four-year rhythm by construction, not by coincidence.
Add up the series and it stops at 83,999,999.908 coins, which is 0.0924 short of the round number repeated everywhere. The reward reaches zero at the 33rd halving; the code guards at 64, past which the bit shift would be undefined.
Fees are bid in litoshi/vB and go entirely to the miner, the same arrangement Bitcoin uses. A node we read on 8 October 2026 put the median at 9,381 litoshi per kilobyte, on a day with no congestion to speak of.
Source litecoin-project/litecoin — src/validation.cpp, src/chainparams.cpp · BlockCypher, read 2026-10-08
- In circulation77,692,004.625
- Not yet issued, up to the cap6,307,995.375
- What the token is forDirectly verified
- How many existDirectly verified
- How new ones appearDirectly verified
- Who received themDirectly verified
- Who can change the rulesDirectly verified
The KLEAR3 rating
4out of 5 in the KLEAR3 rating
Each axis gets 0 to 5 from the facts in the register, against thresholds written in advance. The overall score is their weighted average, and it only appears once at least 5 of the 6 axes rest on a measured fact.
- Audits ×1.3
- Open code ×1.2
- Business model ×1.1
- Token alignment ×1
- Governance ×1
- Maturity ×0.7
- Open code5
public repository · MIT licence · 23 published releases · 26 commits in 90 days
- Audits1
1 firm on the core · 1 audited scope
What holds it back no report opened: we do not know what they found
- Business model5
business model published by the protocol · paid by whoever sends the transaction · collected by the miner who produces the block · all of it to the miner, nothing is destroyed
- Governance4
decided by a public proposal process (LIP), with no vote · 5 improvement proposals published · process open for 8 years
- Token alignment5
supply capped at 84 million · 92% already in circulation · emission schedule published · no initial allocation: every coin comes from the block reward
- Maturity5
14 years of public code · 1 network verified by us
We rate the protocol: how it is built, how much of it can be checked, how its token lines up. Never an investment. A high score is not advice to buy, and a low one is not advice to sell.
What we could not establish
Two things. We did not open a severity-coded breakdown of the one audit that exists: Quarkslab’s own account names a fixed consensus-level defect but no count for the multiple low-impact ones it also found. And beyond that single MWEB audit, the core payment code itself has never been independently reviewed.
A vaguer finding is still a finding, and we would rather publish it unscored than invent a severity table Quarkslab never wrote. The circulating supply of 77,692,004.625 is also a third-party figure we did not read on the chain ourselves.
Frequently asked questions
Is Litecoin’s supply cap really 84 million?
No, and the real number tracks Bitcoin’s trick exactly. The code pays 50 LTC a block and halves that by shifting bits every 840 000 blocks, four times Bitcoin’s interval, for blocks four times faster, which lands the halving on the same roughly four-year rhythm Bitcoin keeps.
Bit shifting on whole numbers drops a fraction every time, so each halving discards the odd litoshi for good. Add the 33 halvings that produce anything and the series stops 0.0924 LTC short of the 84 million everyone repeats, a gap nobody wrote down on purpose.
Nobody states this total anywhere in the project's own documentation; we summed the series ourselves, the same method used for Bitcoin's 20 999 999,9769. A round number repeated by every directory is, in both cases, an approximation of a sum nobody ever wrote down.
What happened to Litecoin’s privacy feature in April 2026?
A zero-day let attackers push an unbalanced MWEB transaction past nodes still running old software, which forked the chain for over three hours and let roughly 600 000 dollars be drained through NEAR Intents before 13 blocks of bad history were rewritten away the next morning.
The fix itself, commit 1dcbf3f, was written by David Burkett on the day of the attack and shipped the next morning as Litecoin Core v0.21.5.4, described in its own release notes as a validation fix, addressing an issue that could let the MWEB kernel sum become unbalanced, the exact bug behind the peg-outs.
It is the first attack MWEB has faced since the feature activated in 2022-05, and the first security incident any KLEAR3 fiche has had to document with a real patch attached to it, rather than a clean audit trail and nothing else to show for it.
Has Litecoin’s code ever been audited?
Once, and only part of it. Quarkslab spent 45 person-days in January 2022 reviewing how the MimbleWimble privacy sidechain plugs into the main chain, on behalf of the Litecoin Foundation, and found one consensus-affecting defect alongside several smaller, unquantified low-impact ones, all fixed before the report was published.
The serious one mattered most: a validation function on the sidechain was not properly called from the canonical chain, which could in theory have let a corrupted block through unnoticed. It was fixed before publication. The core payment code outside MWEB has never been independently reviewed at all.
That same sidechain was exploited for real four years later, which does not make the 2022 report worthless, it shows what an audit actually is: a photograph of the code on one date, not a guarantee against a bug introduced, or simply missed, afterward.
Where to read on, at the source — every address answered 200 on 2026-10-08.
Read next: our Bitcoin profile shows the code this fork started from, and our methodology sets out what counts as a source here.
Ask an assistant to summarise it and check what it claims.