- Litecoin’s miner difficulty increased in response to the jump in hash rate.
- LTC grew 2.58% in the last 24 hours.
Mining activity remains central to a blockchain’s security, the validity of Proof-of-Work (PoW) blockchains, and the issuance of their native cryptocurrencies.
Experts and traders therefore keep a close eye on mining-related metrics to gauge the health of the network.
Litecoin sees an influx of miners
Litecoin [LTC], one of the largest PoW chains, saw its mining difficulty surge to an all-time high (ATH) of 30.03 million (M), AMBCrypto spotted using Litecoin Space data.
This marked a difficulty increase of nearly 6% in the last 24 hours and a 16% jump over the last week.
Source: Litecoin Space
As is well established, mining difficulty is periodically adjusted based on the total network hash rate. This is done to ensure that the time taken to generate a new block remains constant, i.e., 2.5 minutes on the Litecoin blockchain.
In the present scenario, a sharp uptick in hash rate was observed over the last few days, peaking at 872 TeraHashes per second (TH/s) at press time. This was possibly due to an influx of miners/rigs or the adoption of sophisticated mining equipment.
Therefore, to offset the increased mining capability, difficulty was increased.
A higher mining difficulty, on a broader scale, suggests that the network was more secure, ruling out manipulation by a select few powerful entities.
Moreover, the growing number of miners also reflected network growth, a bullish signal for LTC in the long run.
Network utilization jumps
Litecoin has been quite active since December 2023, with daily active users and on-chain transactions reaching unprecedented levels. Active addresses surged to ATH of 1.39 million on 8 December, AMBCrypto found using Santiment’s data.
Source: Santiment
Fees still not burning a hole
However, despite growing traffic, transaction fees remained very much in control. On average, miners earned $1.84 for every block produced, data from Litecoin Space showed.
This was significantly lower than the $3.44/block charged during the Ordinals frenzy in May.
Source: Litecoin Space
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A plausible reason behind this could be the increase in hash rate, which made sure transactions were getting included in a block quickly. As a result, users didn’t have to bid up fees to jump the queue.
The jump in mining indicators had a positive bearing on the native coin, LTC. The “digital silver” grew 2.58% in the last 24 hours, AMBCrypto observed using CoinMarketCap’s data.
