Litecoin halves crypto rewards for miners to 12.5 LTC

Litecoin, the fourth-largest cryptocurrency by market cap at the time of writing, has halved its block reward for miners, CoinDesk reported.

Litecoin founder Charlie Lee announced the halving event in a tweet:

By design, the litecoin network will reduce its mining rewards by half every 840,000 blocks.

On Monday, the litecoin blockchain reached the block height of 1,680,000 at 10:16 UTC. BTC.com’s Litecoin explorer shows that at block height 1,680,001 produced at 10:18 UTC and relayed by Antpool, the mining rewards were reduced to 12.5 LTC from the previous 25 LTC.

LTC/USD is currently trading at $102 at the time of writing. Nearly 63 million LTC are currently in circulation out of the total issuance of 84 million. This essentially means that miners have around 21 million block mining rewards to compete for henceforth.

CoinDesk noted that the litecoin network’s hash rate computing and mining difficulty have both soared by 200 percent since the end of December in line with the price rise ahead of the anticipated halving of mining rewards.

In a tweet, Lee said that 12 blocks have been found on the litecoin blockchain in 17 minutes since the halving, adding:

“Seems like miners have not shut off their hashrate at all. Instead, we are mining at a rate of a block every 1.4 minutes on average, which is much faster than the expected 2.5 minutes. Litecoin network is healthy!”