Swap Litecoin (LTC)

The numbers below were checked on 14 October 2026 against Litecoin Core's chain parameters on github.com and block timestamps on litecoinspace.org.

Blocks: every 2.5 minutes on average

Litecoin is a fork of the Bitcoin code from 2011 with the block target set to 150 seconds instead of 600 and the proof-of-work function changed to Scrypt. Its chain parameters retarget difficulty every 3.5 days' worth of blocks — 2,016 of them, as in Bitcoin, but at a quarter of the spacing. The genesis block carries the timestamp of 7 October 2011. The target is an average: blocks come irregularly, and a run of slow ones is normal.

Confirmations the site waits for

The route data behind this site counts an LTC deposit after 5 confirmations. Five blocks at 2.5 minutes is twelve and a half; with processing at the low end and slow blocks at the high end the estimate reads 14–29 minutes. That is quicker than Bitcoin's two confirmations here (21–44 minutes) because Litecoin's blocks are four times as frequent, and slower than Zcash's six at 75 seconds.

Fees: a market that is rarely busy

Litecoin fees work exactly as Bitcoin's do — each transaction offers a rate per byte, and miners fill blocks from the top — but Litecoin blocks are seldom full, so there is rarely a queue to outbid. A wallet's default fee is almost always enough, and a deposit that sits unconfirmed for an hour is unusual rather than, as on Bitcoin in a busy week, expected. Replace-by-fee exists in Litecoin Core as it does in Bitcoin Core; most wallets never need it.

Supply and halvings

The subsidy started at 50 LTC and halves every 840,000 blocks, which with the 2.5-minute target is about four years. The third halving, at block 2,520,000 on 2 August 2023, set the subsidy to 6.25 LTC; the next is at block 3,360,000. Multiplying it out gives the cap: 84 million LTC, four times Bitcoin's. A halving changes what miners earn and nothing about how a transfer is made or confirmed.

SegWit and MWEB

Litecoin activated Segregated Witness at block 1,201,536 on 10 May 2017, three months before Bitcoin did; ltc1… addresses date from then. MWEB — MimbleWimble Extension Blocks — is an optional side pool inside Litecoin blocks where amounts are hidden. Its version-bits deployment is written into chainparams with a start height of 2,217,600, and the extension went live in May 2022. Coins inside MWEB have ltcmweb1… addresses. Neither the deposit nor the payout of a swap touches MWEB: the form refuses an ltcmweb1… payout address, and a deposit must come from an ordinary Litecoin address, so a holder with coins in MWEB pegs them out to a regular address first.

A Litecoin deposit is the slow-but-steady kind. Five confirmations in a quarter of an hour, a fee that needs no thought, and a format check that catches a Bitcoin address. If the status has not moved after half an hour, look the hash up on the explorer before anything else.

Litecoin has four address prefixes in use, three of which are its own. They were checked against Litecoin Core's chainparams.cpp on github.com on 14 October 2026.

L… and M… are Base58Check, 34 characters, case-sensitive, with a four-byte checksum. ltc1… is Bech32, lowercase (or all uppercase for QR codes), with a six-character checksum; a single-key address is 43 characters and a script address 63, one longer than Bitcoin's because the prefix is one character longer. 3… is the problem child: Litecoin's original script addresses used version byte 5, the same as Bitcoin's, so a 3… string is a valid address on both chains and nothing in it says which. Litecoin introduced the M prefix to end that, and every Litecoin wallet can show the M… form of a 3… address.

What the form accepts

For an LTC payout the form takes L…, M… or ltc1… and checks the checksum. It refuses 3…, precisely because it cannot tell a Litecoin 3… from a Bitcoin one, and it refuses ltcmweb1…, because the payout is made from the transparent side of the chain. Testnet addresses fail, and so does anything from another network. The deposit address the form shows for an LTC deposit is an ordinary L…, M… or ltc1… address that any wallet or exchange withdrawal can pay.

Which address to give

1. Your own wallet: the address on its Receive screen. ltc1… is the default of most current wallets and the cheapest to spend from later; M… if the wallet is older or multisig.
2. An exchange: the address from its LTC deposit page, exactly as shown. If the page shows a 3… address, look for a setting that shows the M… form; if there is none, the exchange's page is out of date and another exchange may be easier.
3. Another person: ask for an L…, M… or ltc1… address and read the first and last characters back. If they give you a 3… address, ask which coin it is for before anything else.

Litecoin and Bitcoin addresses side by side

Litecoin's prefixes map onto Bitcoin's one for one — L for 1, M for 3, ltc1 for bc1 — and that is the thing to hold in mind. A Bitcoin wallet will not accept an L… address and a Litecoin wallet will not accept a 1… one, so those mistakes are caught. The 3… overlap is the only place where a wrong-chain transfer looks right to both sides until the coins have gone. Bitcoin address types as a payout address covers the Bitcoin half of the story.

Every Litecoin transaction has a 64-character hash, and anyone with the hash can look it up. The status page links the Litecoin side of a swap to Blockchair; litecoinspace.org shows the same transaction with a clearer view of fees and the mempool. The transaction page on either shows the amount, the fee and the fee rate, the inputs and outputs with their addresses and amounts, the size and weight, and whether the transaction is confirmed — in which block, and how many confirmations since. An unconfirmed transaction shows its position in the mempool instead of a block.

MWEB on the explorer

A transaction that pegs coins into or out of MWEB shows the transparent side — the amount leaving an ordinary address, or arriving at one — and a reference to the extension block for the rest. Amounts and addresses inside MWEB are not shown. A swap never touches MWEB, so a deposit or payout page here always has ordinary inputs and outputs.

A deposit you sent

1. Copy the hash from your wallet's transaction list — the hash, not the address.
2. Open it on either explorer. Not found means the wallet has not broadcast it; a wallet that was offline when you pressed Send, or an exchange still processing the withdrawal, is the usual reason.
3. Check the output: the deposit address from the form, with the exact amount.
4. If it is unconfirmed, compare its fee rate with what recent blocks took. On Litecoin that is rarely the problem; if it is, wait or bump with replace-by-fee where the wallet offers it.
5. Watch the count. The status page updates on its own at each block up to five.

A payout you received

1. Open the payout hash from the status page.
2. Find your address among the outputs. The amount next to it is "You get" from the form, with the payout network fee already taken out.
3. Count the confirmations. Your wallet shows the coins as pending at zero and spendable after its own number; an exchange credits them after its own count, often several blocks.
4. Keep the hash. It is the evidence that the payout happened and what support on either side will ask for.

Reading a 3… address on the explorer

If someone gives you a 3… address and you want to know which chain it belongs to, the explorer can tell you: open it on a Litecoin explorer and on a Bitcoin one. Both will show a valid page — the address is valid on both — but only one of them will show a history. An address with no history on either is a new one, and the only safe course is to ask for the M… or ltc1… form.

What a block explorer shows about a swap does the same walk for other networks; Reading a swap status page explains each stage of the status page.

Litecoin's mistakes are inherited from Bitcoin's, with one that is Litecoin's own: the shared 3… prefix. The chain itself is forgiving — fees are low, blocks are regular — so what goes wrong is almost always an address.

The 3… address

This is the one mistake the form cannot catch for you on the sending side, because it is not your address that is wrong — it is someone else's. A Litecoin 3… address and a Bitcoin 3… address are the same kind of string, and a person who copies their exchange's old-style LTC deposit address into a Bitcoin withdrawal form, or the other way round, gets a successful transaction on the wrong chain. The form here refuses 3… for an LTC payout for exactly that reason. When a person gives you one, ask for the M… form; when an exchange shows one, look for the setting that switches it.

MWEB and the swap

MWEB is a place coins can go inside the Litecoin chain, not a separate chain. Coins there are still LTC and can be pegged out to any ordinary address with a normal transaction. The swap simply does not look there: a payout goes to a transparent address, and a deposit is counted from a transparent address. A holder who keeps a balance in MWEB does one peg-out before the swap and, if they want, one peg-in after.

Less arrives than the form expects

Exchanges take their withdrawal fee out of the amount you type. The swap runs on what arrived; if the shortfall takes the deposit under the route minimum it cannot be processed as a swap at all. Minimums, maximums and network fees on small swaps shows how the minimum is set.

A confirmed Litecoin transaction cannot be reversed. Five confirmations here are the point of no return on the deposit side; on the payout side, a valid address that is not yours can only be refunded by whoever holds it.

Litecoin changes rarely and by soft fork, like Bitcoin, and a wallet from 2013 still works. Four changes since 2017 matter to someone sending or receiving LTC. Heights come from Litecoin Core's chain parameters on github.com and the block timestamps from litecoinspace.org, both read on 14 October 2026.

SegWit, May 2017. Litecoin's chain parameters record SegwitHeight as 1,201,536, and litecoinspace.org timestamps that block at 16:03 UTC on 10 May 2017 — three months before Bitcoin's activation in August. The visible result is the ltc1… address, which is now what most wallets show by default, and a cheaper transaction for anyone spending from one.

The M prefix. Litecoin Core's chain parameters carry two script-address version bytes: 5, the original and Bitcoin's, and 50, which produces M…. The second was added so that script addresses stop looking like Bitcoin's; Core still accepts both, which is why 3… addresses survive on old exchange pages. The form here accepts M… and refuses 3….

MWEB, May 2022. The deployment is written into chainparams as a version-bits signalling window starting at block 2,217,600 with a timeout at 2,427,264, and the release notes for Litecoin Core 0.21.2 describe the resync needed once MWEB had activated. From then on a Litecoin wallet may show two kinds of address, and the ltcmweb1… kind is not for a swap. Two further MWEB feature activations are scheduled in chainparams at blocks 3,154,440 and 3,172,640; both concern the extension's internals, not ordinary transfers.

The third halving, August 2023. Block 2,520,000 was mined at 15:06 UTC on 2 August 2023 and took the subsidy from 12.5 to 6.25 LTC. The earlier halvings were at blocks 840,000 and 1,680,000. The next is at 3,360,000; the date depends on how fast blocks come.

What has not changed. 2.5-minute blocks, an 84-million cap, irreversible transactions, and a fee the wallet picks without help. An L… address from 2012 still receives coins today, and the five confirmations this site waits for mean what they meant then.

Litecoin was built from the Bitcoin code, and for a transfer the two behave the same way with different numbers. People who hold both usually ask which to send; the answer below is about mechanics, not about which coin to own. The table uses each project's Core chain parameters on github.com (checked 14 October 2026) and the confirmation counts the site waits for; the Bitcoin side is described on the Bitcoin page.

Time. Five Litecoin confirmations take less wall-clock time than two Bitcoin ones, because the block target is a quarter of Bitcoin's. If you hold both and want the swap to finish sooner, send the LTC.

Fees. Litecoin blocks are rarely full, so a wallet's default fee confirms in the next block or two. On Bitcoin the fee is a choice with consequences: too low, and the deposit waits while the rate drifts. The Bitcoin page's Network section is about making that choice; Litecoin has no equivalent section because there is nothing to decide.

Addresses. The prefixes map one to one — L for 1, M for 3, ltc1 for bc1 — and the checksums catch a cross-chain paste in every case but one. Litecoin's original 3… script addresses share Bitcoin's version byte, so a 3… string is valid on both chains; the form accepts 3… only for a BTC payout and asks for L…, M… or ltc1… for an LTC one. Bitcoin's bc1p… Taproot format has no Litecoin counterpart in use.

What the chains hide. Bitcoin hides nothing. Litecoin hides nothing either unless coins are moved into MWEB, and a swap never goes there. For a transfer the two ledgers are equally public.

Routes. LTC has one route page, into USDT on TRON, with a post on TRON energy and bandwidth that explains what the receiving side needs; it also appears as a receiving coin in the form. BTC has the wider set, including BTC → XMR with a step-by-step post.