There are only 100 days left until the Litecoin block reward halving. Will the price rise like last time?

Litecoin (LTC), one of the earliest Bitcoin forks, is just 100 days away from a block reward reduction event, which will make the coin harder to mine and therefore potentially make the Litecoins in circulation more valuable, cryptoslate.com reported.

Just like Bitcoin, Litecoin goes through a process called reward halving, which reduces the rewards miners receive for mining, thereby reducing its issuance rate. The block reward is halved every 840,000 LTC blocks mined. This event is scheduled to occur every 4 years, and the current block generation time is set to approximately 2.5 minutes, with 576 blocks generated per day.

Therefore, the 1,680,000th block is estimated to arrive around August 6, 2019, and the current block reward of 25 LTC will be halved to 12.5 LTC after that. With the reduction of supply in the future, the inflation rate of the cryptocurrency will also be affected for a longer period of time.

After that, halvings will continue until the total supply of 84,000,000 LTC is mined. Although it is impossible to accurately predict when all LTC will be mined, it is estimated to occur in 2142 based on the current reward schedule.

Since its launch on October 13, 2011, Litecoin has only experienced one halving event. On August 26, 2015, at block height 840,000, the mining reward dropped from 50 LTC to 25 LTC. This event had a great impact on Litecoin’s market valuation.

From April 13 to May 21, 2015, LTC traded between $1.35 and $1.5, with the price finally rising on May 22, 2015. In 48 days, it rose from $1.48 to $8.97, a 506.08% increase.

After reaching its peak on July 9, 2015, Litecoin even fell back to 76.24% the day before the halving, trading at $2.4. In the following months, Litecoin has been adjusting between $2.87 and $3.24 until the bull run began on March 30, 2017, with its highest reaching $370.78.

Just like what happened in the last halving, a lot of speculation surrounded the event, but when it happened, most investors sold for profit, causing the price to go lower. While there may be more room for upside later, blindly bullish just because the block reward is halved can be very dangerous.

Image source: pixabay

AuthorLiang CHE