Thinking of investing in Ether or Litecoin? Read this blog to know more about ETH and LTC and find out the key differences that set them apart.
Cryptocurrency is known to be synonymous with Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum (ETH) because they’re the biggest digital currencies in terms of market cap and use case. Bitcoin has disrupted finance as we know it.
But Ethereum’s release in 2015 signalled a massive change in the blockchain world. While BTC laid the groundwork for smart contracts, Ethereum made the concept indispensable to the blockchain.
This is one of the many reasons for the massive adoption of Ethereum as a protocol. Somewhere in between BTC and ETH, there came Litecoin (LTC), a digital currency that claimed to be the evolution of BTC.
LTC was faster and more secure than BTC but it wasn’t as disruptive as and didn’t change the game like ETH. That said, it was at one point in 2015 the 3rd biggest cryptocurrency in the world ahead of Ethereum.
Why has the value of ETH and LTC divulged drastically over the last few years? And what’s the pick of the lot between ETH and LTC? That’s what we’ll explore in this blog, starting with the differences between the two.
Ethereum is a decentralized ledger that’s built on the blockchain. While Bitcoin is just a cryptocurrency, Ethereum is a platform that allows apps to be built on it called dApps and has a token of its own called Ether.
Ether coin (ETH) allows developers who’ve built dApps to monetize their services while investors can use ETH as a tradeable asset or for payments and transactions.
On the other hand, Litecoin mirrors its inspiration Bitcoin in many ways and is thus a peer to peer digital currency that can be used for global payments or as an asset that can be traded on an exchange.
By now, you’d be able to tell that Ethereum has a broader functionality that makes ETH all the more attractive to its investors. However, the devil lies in the details.
The broad functionality of Ethereum comes at a cost (literally). It’s known as a “gas fee” that’s paid by Ethereum users in exchange for the complex computation that the ETH ledger performs.
The ETH gas fee can go well above $80 depending on the transaction speed and other factors of the protocol whereas the transaction fee on LTC is close to $0.04.
This is where it gets interesting, especially for ETH and LTC miners. Mining is an activity that’s performed to verify transactions on the blockchain and introduce new tokens into circulation.
Ethereum rewards miners with 2 ETH per block along with gas & transaction fees. 2 ETH currently totals up to more than $8,000 (excluding the other fees).
Litecoin, on the other hand, rewards miners with 12.5 LTC per block, which totals up to more than $1,900. Since we’re on the topic of mining, it’s useful to know the number of ETH and LTC tokens in existence.
Currently, there are a little over 69.20 million LTC in supply with a cap of 84 million. This means that there can never be more than 84 million LTC in the market because it is a deflationary token.
This isn’t the case for ETH. There is no lifetime supply cap but there is, however, an annual supply cap of 18 million ETH. A lot to keep up with? Don’t worry - we’ve put all the differences in the table below.
Ethereum was trailing behind Litecoin back in 2015 but the crypto landscape is different in 2021. There’s constant innovation, none more so than on the Ethereum protocol.
There are layers to the ERC-20 protocol with platforms like Polygon (MATIC) offering a way to build on top of ETH as a layer 2 network. As a result, ETH is one of the most coveted cryptocurrencies in the market.
That said, ETH is known to have deficiencies and is still speculative just like Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. Moreover, Litecoin is no pushover and boasts a market cap of $10.65 billion.
LTC buffs may point out that the project is highly focused on being good at one thing while constantly evolving with the market. In fact, Litecoin is famous for keeping up with the erratic world of blockchain.
Thus, whether or not you should invest in ETH or LTC would depend on factors like:
It’s also important to note that crypto, regardless of whether it is ETH or LTC, is prone to rampant volatility. Investors must thus exercise caution before investing in ETH, LTC, or other cryptocurrencies.
Note: Facts & figures are true as of 16-12-2021. None of the information shared here is to be construed as investment advice. Exercise caution when investing in unregulated assets like cryptocurrency.
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