Litecoin Network Hashrate
What is Litecoin's hashrate?
Hashrate is the total number of Scrypt hash attempts all Litecoin miners make each second, shown here in TH/s (terahashes per second, 10¹² hashes/s). Scrypt is a deliberately memory-hard algorithm, so its numbers are thousands of times smaller than Bitcoin's SHA-256 figures — a Scrypt TH/s and a SHA-256 TH/s are not comparable. More hashrate means blocks arrive faster, until difficulty retargets every 2,016 blocks to hold the 150-second block interval.
One thing makes Litecoin's hashrate special: through merged mining (AuxPoW), nearly all of this Scrypt power simultaneously secures Dogecoin. The same rigs, the same electricity, two block rewards.
How hashrate is estimated
Hashrate is never measured directly — miners don't report it. It is inferred from the current difficulty and how fast blocks are actually arriving.
window_estimate ≈ implied_hashrate × (blocks_found / blocks_expected)
· e.g. difficulty 50,000,000 implies ≈ 1,430 TH/s at exactly 150-second blocks
Difficulty × 2³² is the average number of hashes needed to find one block; dividing by the 150-second target gives the hashrate that would produce that pace. Blocks arriving faster than target scale the estimate up, slower scales it down. Because block discovery is random, single-day estimates wobble by several percent — the chart uses period averages.
Why it matters for miners
Each block pays a fixed reward (currently 6.25 LTC subsidy plus fees), so the network's revenue pie is fixed per block and your expected share equals your hashrate divided by network hashrate. When network hashrate rises 10% and yours doesn't, your LTC earned per MH/s drops about 9%. That per-unit revenue is what hashprice tracks — and for Scrypt rigs the true figure includes the merged-mined DOGE, which typically adds a meaningful slice on top of the LTC reward.
FAQ
- What does TH/s mean for Litecoin?
- TH/s means terahashes per second — 10¹² Scrypt hash attempts every second. The ladder: 1 TH/s = 1,000 GH/s = 1,000,000 MH/s. A modern Scrypt ASIC does roughly 10–17 GH/s (approx. manufacturer spec), so 1 TH/s is on the order of 60–100 machines. Litecoin's Scrypt TH/s and Bitcoin's SHA-256 TH/s are different algorithms and cannot be compared directly.
- Why does the Litecoin hashrate estimate jump around?
- Hashrate is not measured — it is inferred from how fast blocks arrive, and block discovery is random. With a 150-second target Litecoin finds about 576 blocks per day, which smooths daily estimates somewhat, but short-window luck still moves the number by several percent. Multi-week averages are far more reliable than any single day.
- Does Litecoin's hashrate also mine Dogecoin?
- Mostly, yes. Through merged mining (AuxPoW), the same Scrypt work that solves a Litecoin block can simultaneously solve a Dogecoin block, and most major Litecoin pools mine both. That is why Dogecoin's hashrate closely tracks Litecoin's, and why Scrypt miners earn LTC and DOGE from the same electricity.