12 years, 200,000,000 transactions, 100% uptime. LTC has realized its digital silver aspiration.

It took Litecoin 10 years to reach 100,000,000 transactions. No fancy smart contract operations, no yield farming, mostly just real money transfers and purchases. It took less than 2 years to get the second 100,000,000 transactions. And while omnilite nfts and L'Ordinals have contributed more recently, litecoin probably has about 1/5th the ordinals that BTC has and is still recently exceeding daily BTC transactions repeatedly in recent days. So it's still mostly a medium of transaction story playing out.

Onchain transactions don't tell the whole story. We've all seen chains either 1) completely fake onchain transactions 2) unsustainable incentivize sorta real activity that collapses once the incentives dry up. So it's important to compare onchain data to offchain data to see if they match. Faking things onchain is cheap, just pay small tx fees.

Conversely, faking data at bitpay is not so cheap. You actually have to buy stuff. You're out the fees, and the cost of the items, shipping. Perhaps that's why no altcoin in history every took the number one slot on bitpay until this year. Because it had to happen for real. Which altcoin did it twice this year, first this summer and then last month? And was also the first altcoin to exceed the share of every other altcoin on the platform? Litecoin.

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Bitpay stats for July-Nov 2023 available at bitpay dot com slash stats

Bitpay is the oldest largest crypto payments processor I know of, going back to 2011. It's often behind the addition of retailers and infrastructure that makes the news, like Roblox, AMC (including recent Taylor Swift ticketing news) and Newegg, once upon a time, even Steam. They were behind crypto integration with point of sale provider verifone who does 14 billion fiat transactions a year.

As recently as 2020, bitpay stats held Bitcoin at 90% of their transaction share. They added litecoin in 2021 and things changed fast. It hit #2 in 3 months and only ever left the number 2 spot to occasional steal the number 1 slot from the king. It's okay, bitcoin, you still win store of value, and this is why digital silver exists, to help on the transactional side.

But don't just look at one outlet, of course. It'd be nice if all info were consolidated, but it isn't. So you have to look around. Litecoin has always been early to big exchanges and is supported about as broadly as eth and btc there and at other infrastructure. In one infrastructure case, coin atms, we know share numbers thanks to coinatmradar. Wouldn't you know it, the second most popular coin looks familiar.

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coinatmradar global stats

The closest I've found to a global scorecard of infrastructure usage is kaiko liquidity. Bear in mind that liquidity ranking usually tilt toward fiat values, so if a lower mcap coin is scoring top 5 alongside coins with mcaps multiple times higher, the reality of its advantage is being massively understated. In Q3, the most recent report I can find, Litecoin is outscoring most of the top ten mcap coins in liquidity.

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Kaiko Liquidity Ranking Q3

Those are ordered by mcap, but you see the liquidity score in orange. It's a good indication that litecoin's infrastructure advantage hasn't been priced in by the investor class. That right now, litecoin's adoption is mostly coming from real world users more than traders. It's one of the things I love about it. My strategy is to buy unpriced network effects, and there aren't many of those to be found in crypto. Usually investors buy future network effects at a premium, hoping users will come eventually. Rarely do so many users coalesce w/o an investor pile-on.

All that to say this, yeah, those 200,000,000 transactions are the real deal. As is the 12 year 100% uptime that is unique to litecoin alone. Even Bitcoin's uninterrupted uptime is only just over 10 years. Litecoin has fulfilled the role it aspired to in the early days, to become digital silver.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year from your friendly neighborhood LitecoinFam ???? I, for one, could really use that coal I'm getting from santa for being a crypto degen. Gotta keep warm somehow.