In today’s “Crypto for Advisors” newsletter, Josh Olszewicz from Canary Capital breaks down Litecoin from its history to its growth.
Then, in “Ask an Expert”, Billy Luedtke of Institution, answers questions about decentralized finance and its growth.
Thank you to our sponsor of this week’s newsletter, Grayscale. For financial advisors near Denver, Grayscale is hosting an exclusive event, Crypto Connect, on Thursday, October 23. Learn more.
– Sarah Morton
Litecoin: A Resilient Digital Asset for the Long Term
is one of the oldest and most established cryptocurrencies still in active use. Created in October 2011 by former Google engineer Charlie Lee, Litecoin was launched as a source-code fork of Bitcoin. While Bitcoin pioneered decentralized digital money, Litecoin sought to improve on its design by offering faster settlement times, lower transaction costs, and a larger supply. For this reason, is often referred to as “the silver to bitcoin’s gold.”
Key Technical Features
Litecoin shares Bitcoin’s proof-of-work (PoW) foundation but differs in several critical areas. Its block time is 2.5 minutes, compared to Bitcoin’s 10 minutes, allowing for quicker transaction confirmations. The maximum supply is 84 million coins, four times larger than Bitcoin’s 21 million, which makes individual units more accessible. Instead of Bitcoin’s SHA-256 mining algorithm, Litecoin employs Scrypt, which was designed to make mining more broadly accessible before the advent of application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs).
Since its inception, Litecoin has maintained uninterrupted network uptime, a rarity in the blockchain sector. This reliability, paired with low transaction fees that average under 10 cents, has positioned litecoin as a practical medium of exchange rather than primarily a store of value.
Innovation and Adoption
Litecoin has also been an early testing ground for key blockchain innovations. In 2017, it became the first major network to activate Segregated Witness (SegWit), a scaling upgrade that optimizes block space and resolves transaction malleability. Shortly afterward, Litecoin helped pioneer the Lightning Network (LN), a second-layer protocol enabling instant, near-zero-cost payments. The first cross-chain Lightning transaction, routing LTC to BTC, took place shortly after SegWit activation.
Security has also been reinforced through a merged-mining arrangement with since 2014. By sharing hash power between the two Scrypt-based networks, both ecosystems benefit from stronger protection against potential 51% attacks.
Supply Dynamics and Network Health
Litecoin’s issuance schedule mirrors Bitcoin’s, with rewards halving every four years. Over 90% of the total 84 million LTC supply has already been mined, and annual inflation stands under 2%. The next halving, expected in July 2027, will reduce inflation below 1%, comparable to many traditional safe-haven assets.
On-chain activity reflects Litecoin’s steady use. Transaction counts have grown during periods of Bitcoin congestion and spikes in Dogecoin demand. Active addresses have shown resilience over time, highlighting relative utility compared with peer networks.
Hash rate, the measure of computing power securing the blockchain, has increased in recent years, supported by improved Scrypt ASIC efficiency and the incentive of combined litecoin-dogecoin mining rewards. Mining power remains concentrated among a handful of pools, but overall network security has never been higher.
Valuation Metrics
Two widely tracked crypto valuation tools, the network value to transactions (NVT) ratio and the market value to realized value (MVRV) ratio, provide context for Litecoin’s current standing. NVT, which measures market capitalization relative to on-chain activity, sits below bitcoin’s and dogecoin’s, suggesting litecoin may be more fairly valued relative to its utility. Meanwhile, MVRV, which compares market price to the average price at which coins last moved, remains below long-term bull market levels, signaling subdued speculative excess.
External sentiment indicators confirm this picture. Google Trends data for “Litecoin” has declined steadily since its 2021 peak, pointing to reduced retail enthusiasm. However, such conditions have historically aligned with undervalued entry points in previous market cycles.
Takeaways for Financial Advisors
For advisors evaluating the digital asset landscape, Litecoin represents a case study in durability. It has operated continuously for more than a decade, survived multiple market downturns, and consistently delivered on its value proposition: fast, low-cost, reliable transactions. While it does not command Bitcoin’s brand dominance or Ethereum’s smart contract ecosystem, Litecoin fills a complementary role within the broader digital asset market.
In portfolio construction, Litecoin can be considered as:
- A diversification tool within a crypto allocation, offering exposure to a network distinct from Bitcoin but with a proven security model.
- A lower-beta play on transaction-focused cryptocurrencies, with relatively muted speculation compared to meme-driven assets like dogecoin.
- A long-term store of utility, benefiting from declining issuance and consistent adoption, even amid shifting market narratives.
For clients exploring digital assets, Litecoin stands as one of the most tested and resilient networks in the space. Its combination of security, innovation, and practical utility underscores why it continues to endure as a key component of the crypto ecosystem.
– Josh Olszewicz, portfolio manager, Canary Capital
Ask an Expert
Q. Decentralized finance (DeFi) has experienced explosive growth, hype cycles, and is now pushing toward maturity. From your perspective, what’s the biggest gap still holding DeFi back from mainstream adoption?
A. DeFi has proven that trustless code can automate financial services at scale. But code alone isn’t enough. Even in a “trustless” system, participants constantly rely on trust: that smart contracts are secure, that oracle data is accurate, that a counterparty isn’t malicious, and that audits address the right risks. Because on-chain transactions are irreversible, failures in those trust assumptions can be catastrophic.
What DeFi lacks is a trustful interaction layer to complement trustless execution. Protocols are blind to who’s on the other side of a transaction and whether their information is credible. There’s no native way to verify identity, reputation, or track record in a structured, verifiable format. This leaves users vulnerable, prevents protocols from assessing creditworthiness, and deters institutions.
Closing this gap requires infrastructure that makes information itself verifiable and composable. At Intuition, we’re building exactly that: a trust and reputation layer for DeFiand the broader information economy.
Q. A lot of people talk about how DeFi needs better ways to handle reputation, creditworthiness, and trust. What do you see as the most promising approaches for solving those challenges?
Attestations have been part of Ethereum’s DNA from the start, the original white paper even highlighted identity as a core use case. For more than a decade, builders have experimented with attestations, or signed on-chain statements, to capture trust. Yet so far they’ve been limited to narrow flows: proving a single credential or verifying one fact at a time.
What’s missing is making attestations usable at scale in richer contexts. Instead of just asking, “does this address hold this credential?”, we should be able to analyze thousands or even millions of claims to understand an entity’s reputation. That’s the missing layer.
At Intuition, we’re building exactly that: an attestation graph that makes verifiable data portable and usable. By connecting attestations into a graph, smart contracts and AI agents can reason about history, context, and reputation, unlocking credit scores, undercollateralized lending, access control, and permissionless reputation markets.
Q. Looking ahead, what kinds of DeFi applications or innovations do you think will define the next wave of growth, and how might infrastructure like verifiable data or reputation systems play a role?
The next wave of DeFi won’t just be about moving capital faster; it will be about moving trust faster. Smart contracts gave us trustless execution, but the missing piece is verifiable context about who and what we’re dealing with.
When attestations and reputation can reliably exist on-chain, DeFi evolves beyond being purely collateral-based. Undercollateralized lending becomes possible, pool access can be gated by reputation rather than arbitrary whitelists, and governance can reward real contributions instead of idle token balances. Entire markets for reputation itself open up, where the credibility of an address or dataset can be priced, traded, or staked against outcomes.
This is also what AI agents will need as they move from executing swaps to making complex decisions under uncertainty. A verifiable trust and reputation graph provides the foundation.
– Billy Luedtke, CEO, Intuition
Keep Reading
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- Citibank plans to launch crypto custody services in 2026.
