Litecoin Marks 15th Anniversary With Genesis Block Details
Litecoin (LTC)
Editor:
Eugene Serbin
cryptotimes.io reports that Litecoin celebrated its 15th anniversary on October 7, 2026, marking the date Charlie Lee mined the genesis block at 07:31:05 UTC in 2011. The block contains the timestamp 1317972665 and the headline "NY Times 05/Oct/2011 Steve Jobs, Apple’s Visionary, Dies at 56," which Lee used to prove the block was created after October 5, 2011. Lee reverse-engineered the process to create this hard-coded block, which carries an unspendable 50 LTC reward and the hash beginning 12a765e3.
To prevent ninja mining, Lee premined two blocks containing 100 coins, withholding the nTime and nNonce values until the public network launched. The launch time was determined by a Bitcointalk poll where 39 of 91 voters selected Thursday, October 13, at 03:00 GMT. Just before the deadline, Lee launched a prank link leading to a Rick Astley video before releasing the two withheld parameters one second before the scheduled hour.
Early mining activity saw rapid block discovery and some orphaning due to low starting difficulty. Vitalik Buterin also commented on early threads, criticizing the trend of naming alternative coins after features like speed or weight.
How the market reacted
Whalio's own Binance spot order flow for LTC, measured when this story was written up on 7 October 2026. Not the outlet's figures.
Litecoin is trading at $68.99 with a 24-hour buy ratio of 47.3%, indicating that slightly less than half of the volume is coming from buyers. This selling pressure is consistent over the last hour and four hours, where buy ratios sit at 49.3% and 48.1% respectively. The Volume Delta shows a net outflow of $921,959 over 24 hours, with negative deltas of $24,686 and $158,338 in the shorter timeframes. A negative Volume Delta means that sellers are executing larger market orders than buyers, pushing the price down. The Cumulative Volume Delta closed at -$831,926, confirming that selling pressure has dominated the session. Net buying occurred for only 12 of the last 24 hours, suggesting a lack of sustained buyer interest.
The latest daily buy ratio of 50.1% sits at the 62nd percentile of the last 322 days, against a median of 49.4% - ordinary for this coin.
Was that an ordinary day?
The same Binance spot measurements for LTC, averaged over the days leading up to the story.
Over the preceding week, the average buy ratio was 48.4%, making today’s 47.3% reading slightly below the weekly norm by 1.0 point. Spot volume for the day was $17,437,925, which is 0.61 times the weekly average, indicating significantly lower trading activity than usual. The coin saw net buying on only 2 of the last 7 days, compared to the 12 days of net buying recorded in the last 24 hours. Price has risen 3.2% over the past 8 days, despite a total Volume Delta of -$8,032,996 for the period. This suggests that while the asset has gained value, the recent week has been characterized by net selling pressure and below-average volume.