Today, the 12th day of January 2019, Litecoin is celebrating a milestone after emitting the 60 millionth coin into circulation. After mining block #1560000, the system has now about 71.5% of its total possible coins to be produced in circulation. This data is provided by LitecoinBlockHalf, a website that is dedicated to tracking Litecoin network statistics. After this milestone, there are now 24 million coins left to be mined which according to Litecoin.com should be expected to be mined by the year 2142.
This year also the Litecoin community and network mark another significant event whereby the block reward is expected to be halved from its current 25 Litecoin to 12.5 Litecoin. This event is called is called the Reward Halving and according to the data provided by LitecoinBlockHalf there are about 3 million coins left to the next halving. The blocks left to be mined until the halving event are also about 120,000 blocks as halving happens every 840,000 blocks. A simple calculation using the current block generation time of 2.5 minutes, the block halving is expected to be activated after 208 days from today which is on August 8th, 2019.
Litecoin has a deflationary figure that stands at around 9.15% but after the August halving, this should also be cut in half to about 4.09%. Following these new conditions, the next milestone of 70 million coins will not be expected until somewhere in mid-2022.
Litecoin has not been spared the bear brunt that followed the fall of Bitcoin in 2018 that saw Bitcoin lose more than 80% of its value in the past 13 months. Litecoin suffered even more falling more than 90% in the same time period. it is currently exchanging against the US dollar at ~$32. There is an expected upside once the coin undergoes the Reward Halving in August, however until then, the bear market is holding steady as it does not seem to be ebbing anytime soon.
