Litecoin & Ethereum belong amongst the most recognized crypto projects in the world and are well-known already, but I want to make a clean cut between them and explain the main differences and similarities.
Litecoin vs Ethereum
Litecoin
The Litecoin project was introduced in 2011. by Charlie Lee forking Bitcoin’s main net and it is one of the first crypto projects tending to solve Bitcoin’s low-speed and high-cost transactions.
The project is imagined as fast transactions, low fees, decentralized, and a Lightning Network backed project with a POW (Proof of Work) consensus mechanism. It is much faster than the Bitcoin network indeed, about 4 times to be precise. Also, transaction fees are much cheaper, approximately $0.05 which makes it usable as an everyday payment option once adoption reaches the needed level. The PoW consensus mechanism guarantees decentralization, safety, and stability of the network, which we explained in the previous article.
One of the most important attributes of Litecoin is the limited supply of its native LTC coins which is capped at 84 million. The supporters of the Litecoin project presume its transaction speed, low cost, limited supply, and its ability to split into 8 decimals will push this coin strong in the future and make it one of the most important payment options in the crypto universe.
Another IMO very important feature of the Litecoin project is the fact that the Litecoins Scrypt hashing algorithm doesn’t allow pooling, which makes it one of the most decentralized blockchains in the world. The main purposes of Litecoin are to be used as a store of value and a cryptocurrency.
LTC’s capitalization is around $5 million at the moment, and its price is around $75. From the beginning of 2020. LTC made its rise from $41 to its ATH at $412, which is a 10x rise, and today it stands at almost 2x price compared to three years back period.
You can see detailed price movement in the chart below.
Ethereum
Ethereum is another, very popular and known crypto project, released in 2015. by Vitalik Buterin and his team.
It is ranked as the first altcoin for years now, and many people are not considering it as an altcoin at all because its useability and contribution to crypto evolution are much greater than Bitcoin by far. Its native token, ETH is also a second crypto coin by market capitalization. Ethereum has its own blockchain network whose speed is similar to Litecoin, but with greater transfer fees. This crypto project doesn’t have a limited supply of its native coins ETH, but they limited the issuance of new coins to 4.5% each year, which is enough to keep its price strong.
The project gained popularity because of its smart contracts and the ability to offer other crypto projects and applications to be developed on its blockchain. The fact that you need ETH to operate on the Ethereum blockchain puts it in the position of leading blockchain on a count of usability. To be honest, most of today’s crypto projects in the world wouldn’t exist without Ethereum.
Its network advanced from PoW to PoS (Proof of Stake) consensus mechanism, which reduced the power consumption by 99.9%, making it the most nature-friendly project possible. Compared to Bitcoin which spends around 110 Terawatt of electricity per year, which matches the amount Sweeden spends in the same period of time, we see how advanced the Ethereum network is. This advancement reduced transaction fees significantly, which is a trend expected to continue.
The main purposes of the Ethereum project are its ability to host dApps (decentralized applications) and smart contracts, but it can also be used as a payment method or to store value.
At the same timetable, as we did with LTC, the ETH was worth around $130 on 01.01.2020. and it made its rise to its ATH at $4891, which is almost a 40x rise. The ETH fell down with the complete crypto market and today’s price is around 1250$ which is around 10x from the price range three years ago. ETH’s capitalization is around $150 million at the moment.
You can see detailed price movement in the chart below.
Conclusion
As you can see, both projects are developed nicely and are here to stay in the fields they were meant to be used. In my opinion, Ethereum has a much brighter future, mostly because there are more and more new dApps and smart contracts developed on its network every day, but there is also space for growth and potential for the adoption of the Litecoin network also. To me, market capitalization and token prices are telling the same story and show that Ethereum is a much stronger project than Litecoin.
What do you think?