Litecoin’s mining difficulty has hit an all-time high as competition among heats up on the popular Bitcoin fork.
On Nov. 6, the total Litecoin hashrate surged to highs of 531 terahashes per second (TH/s), data from CoinWarz showed. The network’s hashrate has mostly increased all year, and shot up after Ethereum switched to proof-of-stake in September.
Litecoin’s mining difficulty also reached new highs this weekend. The metric measures how hard it is to mine a block on the network, and rises when competition picks up.
Data shared by the Litecoin Foundation shows that Litecoin Mining reached a total difficulty of 17.99 million hashes – a signal that miners are fighting hard for the network’s block rewards.
Glassnode data showed that 45 million new LTC wallet addresses had been created in the last 11 months, accounting for 28% of all LTC addresses created, meaning the network had a significant amount of recent growth activity. The growth is far higher than new wallets for Bitcoin and Ethereum, although those networks are far larger.
According to Schwartz, the discrepancy between network growth and price action all comes down to public perception of the underlying coins.
“Its suppression. Litecoin has been one of, if not the most shorted crypto for years. Intentionally. Learn to read data. DYOR,” said Schwartz in a tweet.
