# Litecoin Marks 15 Years With a Launch Designed to Limit Premine

By Simon Yoon

Canonical URL: https://www.tokenpost.com/news/technology/27635
Published: 2026-10-07T21:04:14.000Z
Updated: 2026-10-07T21:04:14.000Z
Section: Technology

> Charlie Lee mined Litecoin’s genesis block on Oct. 7, 2011. Public mining began six days later after a community poll, with code available before launch.

Litecoin (LTC) reached its 15th anniversary Wednesday, highlighting a launch structure that gave users early access to the code and limited the window for advance mining.

Charlie Lee mined Litecoin’s genesis block at 3:31:05 a.m. ET (07:31:05 UTC) on Oct. 7, 2011. The block’s Unix timestamp is 1317972665, its nonce is 2084524493 and its hash begins with 12a765e3.

The genesis block includes the text “NY Times 05/Oct/2011 Steve Jobs, Apple’s Visionary, Dies at 56.” Its reward was 50 LTC, but the genesis reward cannot be spent.

Public mining began six days later at 11 p.m. ET on Oct. 12, 2011, equivalent to 03:00 UTC on Oct. 13. A community poll drew 91 votes, with 39 participants selecting that time. The other choices received 30, 12 and 10 votes.

“Litecoin was launched on Thursday Oct 13, 03:00 GMT,” Lee wrote in a launch-thread update.

Lee released Litecoin’s source code and binaries three days before the scheduled launch. That gave users time to compile the software and test it on the network’s testnet. He released the final mining parameters one second before launch to reduce the opportunity for advance mining.

Litecoin has an average block interval of 2.5 minutes, compared with 10 minutes for Bitcoin (BTC), and began with a 50-coin block subsidy. The network uses Scrypt proof-of-work and has a subsidy-halving interval of 840,000 blocks.

Lee said Litecoin was forked directly from Bitcoin’s source code rather than Fairbrix. He linked Fairbrix’s first launch problems to a bug inherited through the Tenebrix code lineage.

The original plan included 150 premined coins from the genesis block and the first two blocks. Because the genesis reward was unspendable, 100 LTC from the first two blocks were usable under Lee’s later explanation.

“Litecoin will come with 150 premined coins: just the genesis block and the first 2 blocks to confirm the genesis is valid,” Lee wrote.

Immediate miner participation produced competing blocks, which led to what was described as “natural orphaning.” The launch records therefore preserve two separate milestones: the genesis block on Oct. 7 and the start of public mining on Oct. 13.