Power of Cryptos: $62M Worth of Litecoins Sent for Mere 50 Cents

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by Teuta Franjkovic · 4 min read
Power of Cryptos: $62M Worth of Litecoins Sent for Mere 50 Cents
Photo: Litecoin.Com / Medium

Litecoin network processed one of its largest transactions ever. A total of 1.159.005 Litecoins (LTC), valued at around $62 Million, was moved for a fee of only $0,50 (0.0092 LTC).

As it’s said in the announcement, this Litecoin transaction is probably connected to the consolidation of funds into a new Multi-Signature / Segwit ‘M’ address from a handful of Legacy addresses.

The transaction which created the new richest address on the network was made by the previous richest address on the network which is now lies empty. In the process a staggering 71,618,997 coin days were also destroyed.

Presuming of the owner of the address, it’s said to most likely be an exchange cold wallet which is used to securely store funds that are held on an exchange offline away from potential attackers. The move into a multi signature address would provide the owners better security as any transactions would need to be signed off by multiple parties as unlike with Legacy addresses there are multiple private keys to the address.

The transaction contained multiple inputs of 20,000 LTC which themselves appear to be made up of four 5,000 LTC transactions each which originate from an address which still maintains a balance over 150,000 LTC as of writing.

This is not the first transaction of this value on the network, however, it is notable nether the less and serves as a perfect real world example of the benefits of Litecoin and decentralized cryptocurrency in the global settlement and movement of money in the internet age.

Interesting fact on this notable transaction is that the funds were moved from those legacy addresses to a ‘Multi-Signature/SegWit M address’, apparently in an attempt to improve security over this large amount of money.

Multi-Signature wallets add an extra safety layer by introducing several new parties, each one with a private key that is needed in order to sign a transaction and validate it. Since these are ‘Script’ addresses, they start with an ‘M’ instead of an ‘L’ (similarly in Bitcoin, legacy BTC addresses began with ‘1’ while script addresses, which are Multi-Sig and SegWit, start with ‘3’).

This address has many varying transactions being made to and from it on a fairly common basis suggesting this is most likely the hotwallet for the exchange and these transactions are users depositing and withdrawing funds from the platform. If you use an exchange and your withdrawn Litecoin has come from this address then you can figure out the owners.

If fees continue to drop and transactions become more efficient, crypto could become a viable option for the transfer of even very large sums of money. Developments like the Lightning Network are bringing this closer to reality, even for notoriously clunky BTC, and products like Xcurrent and Xrapid are trying to get big banks on the crypto train.

Litecoin.com said about the transaction:

“A perfect real-world example of the benefits of Litecoin and decentralized cryptocurrency in the global settlement and movement of money in the internet age.”

Litecoin was created by Charlie Lee in October 2011. This makes Litecoin one of the oldest cryptocurrencies in the crypto space. The source code itself was a fork of Bitcoin with a few notable changes and improvements such as decreased block generation time, utilizing different hashing algorithms and decreasing the time needed to process payments. This made Litecoin 4x faster than Bitcoin.

In the world of conventional currency where bank fees can run $45 or higher per transaction and can be held up while waiting on confirmation from intermediaries – this seems like a meaningful step forward.

Transaction fees for crypto are going down across the board, with other massive transfers of cryptos like Bitcoin being conducted for the equivalent of $0.10 at the time of this writing. The average transaction fee for BTC is still somewhere around $0.36, but that’s still far better than last year’s $25-$55. Other crypto assets like Ripple’s XRP are trying to build a brand based on circumventing the present infrastructure for cross-border payments, which can be the most expensive of all.

Same Story with Bitcoin

Last month we wrote about Bitcoin user moving $194M in BTC with only $0.1 fee. The research based on data provided by a UK-based multi-billion dollar firm for low-fee banking transfers revealed that even on a platform like Transferwise, to send over $1 million, it costs over $7,500 in transaction fees. That means, through wire transfers and conventional banking methods, tens of thousands of dollars are required to clear a transaction that is larger than $1 million.

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