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1,032 addresses control more than 51.2 million Litecoins (LTC) in circulation, on-chain data from BitInfoCharts as of May 15.
Litecoin under siege?
Entries from the “Top 100 Litecoin Rich List” show that 7,355,585 LTC in circulation worth $639,814,097 are controlled by 8.78% of all registered addresses. At the same time, 26,526,499 LTC worth more than $2.3 billion are managed at 111 addresses, and 17,993,930 LTC worth more than $1.5 billion are stored at 918 addresses.
As of May 15, there were 72,924,127 LTC in circulation. Thus, this concentration alone means that more than 60% of all LTCs in circulation are controlled by 1032 addresses. In addition, the network will only issue 84,000 LTC to miners as a block reward.
Litecoin is a proof-of-work network like Bitcoin. It relies on a community of special nodes called miners to validate transactions on the chain and add them to the longest chain. For participation, a lucky miner receives a reward of 12.5 LTC per block every 2.5 minutes.
Litecoin Price May 15 | Source: LTCUSDT on Binance, TradingView
Based on the statistics above, it is notable that the $2.3 billion LTC at spot rates held by 111 addresses represents the largest concentration of any other address range.
To illustrate, 794,934 addresses holding between 0.01 and 0.1 LTC collectively hold 29,508 LTC. With 794,934 addresses in this range, they are the largest number of LTC holders by wallet address count.
However, given their combined holdings, these addresses are in the minority, with whales currently holding over 60% of the total circulating supply. In particular, at the time of writing on May 15, three whales had over 2 million LTC.
The largest LTC whale holds 2,504,667 LTC worth over $217 million. This address is active and constantly accumulating. It should be noted that the largest LTC whales began to accumulate over the past five years, starting in 2018.
According to on-chain data from BitInfoCharts, LTC was last deposited to this address on May 10, 2023. Meanwhile, the last withdrawal was at the beginning of January 2023.
For example, the second largest LTC whale with over 2.47 million coins started depositing coins in mid-June 2022. He filmed part of LTC on February 10, 2023.
Judging by the frequency of deposits and withdrawals, it is highly likely that these addresses do not belong to centralized cryptocurrency exchanges such as Binance or Coinbase.
Will LTC rise before the halving?
Cryptocurrency whales that control a disproportionate number of coins can manipulate prices and influence trends. However, it remains to be seen if this will change ahead of the Litecoin halving. The Litecoin network will halve miner rewards to 6.25 LTC in less than three months.
Based on historical performance, halving events, even in Litecoin, tend to support price increases. Thus, ahead of this event, which is estimated to take place in early August 2023, LTC prices may recover as the coin becomes scarce.
LTC prices are up 15% from their May 2023 lows and are changing hands at $86, according to TradingView data.
