Every Litecoin fork ever made: the complete family tree from 2011 to 2026

Charlie Lee forked Bitcoin in 2011. Within two years, dozens of people forked his fork… everything else.

When Charlie Lee released Litecoin in October 2011, he forked Bitcoin’s codebase, swapped SHA-256 for Scrypt, cut block times from 10 minutes to 2.5, quadrupled the supply cap to 84 million, and called it a day. What he probably didn’t expect was that his creation would become the most-forked altcoin of the 2012–2014 era — a template so easy to clone that dozens of projects ripped the code, changed a few constants, slapped on a new name, and launched within hours.

This article maps the complete family tree. Every known Litecoin fork, from serious projects to outright jokes, from survivors to the long-dead. If you’ve been in crypto since the early days, some of these names will trigger memories you thought you’d buried. If you’re newer, prepare to learn just how wild the 2013 altcoin explosion really was.

The origin: Bitcoin → Litecoin (2011)

Litecoin launched on October 7, 2011, as a direct fork of Bitcoin Core 0.6. The changes were surgical and deliberate:

The Scrypt choice was the critical differentiator. In 2011, Bitcoin mining was already moving toward GPUs and early FPGA devices. Lee chose Scrypt specifically because it was memory-hard — at the time, no ASICs existed for it, meaning ordinary people with CPUs could still mine profitably. That window lasted about two years before Scrypt ASICs arrived anyway, but it was enough to bootstrap a decentralized mining community.

Litecoin proved something important: you could fork Bitcoin, make meaningful parameter changes, and create a viable, lasting network. That proof-of-concept opened the floodgates.

The complete Litecoin family tree

Below is every significant project that forked Litecoin’s codebase directly. Some are well-documented; others required archaeological digs through BitcoinTalk archives and dead GitHub repositories. The table is sorted chronologically.

This table isn’t exhaustive — there were dozens of other micro-forks that never gained enough traction to even appear on early tracking sites like CoinMarketCap or CoinGecko. Many launched on BitcoinTalk, ran for a few hundred blocks, and vanished when the solo developer lost interest or the single mining pool went offline.

The 2013 fork explosion: why it happened

To understand the sheer volume of Litecoin forks in 2013, you need to understand the market conditions. Bitcoin went from $13 in January 2013 to over $1,100 by November. Litecoin followed, surging from $0.07 to $40. Money was pouring in, and the barrier to creating a new cryptocurrency was absurdly low.

The recipe was simple:

1. Clone Litecoin’s GitHub repository
2. Change the coin name, ticker, and port numbers in a few configuration files
3. Adjust the genesis block timestamp and nonce
4. Maybe change the block reward schedule or supply cap
5. Compile, mine the first few blocks yourself
6. Post an announcement thread on BitcoinTalk
7. Wait for miners and speculators to show up

Total development time: often less than a single afternoon. Total original code written: frequently zero. The codebase was identical to Litecoin except for parameter tweaks that a competent programmer could make in 30 minutes.

This was the Wild West era of cryptocurrency. No regulatory oversight, no listing requirements beyond “convince one exchange to add you,” and a community hungry for the next 100x. Most of these projects were pump-and-dump schemes, whether the creators admitted it or not. Some were explicit about it — Junkcoin’s creator literally named it “Junk” and said it had no value proposition.

Why 95% of Litecoin forks died

The graveyard is massive, and the causes of death are remarkably consistent across projects:

No development after launch

Most fork creators were one-person operations. They launched the coin, mined a bunch of the early blocks (often with a hidden pre-mine or instamine), and then abandoned the project once the initial hype faded. Without active development, bugs went unfixed, protocol upgrades never happened, and the codebase rotted against an evolving ecosystem.

No unique value proposition

If your coin is Litecoin with a different name and slightly different block reward schedule, what reason does anyone have to use it, hold it, or build on it? The answer, for virtually all of these forks, was “none.” They competed purely on marketing and novelty, which has a shelf life measured in weeks.

No community

A cryptocurrency without a community is just code running on a server somewhere. Mining participation drops, nodes go offline, hash rate falls to the point where 51% attacks become trivial, and exchanges delist due to low volume. It’s a death spiral that’s nearly impossible to reverse once it begins.

No exchange support

In 2013–2014, exchanges like Cryptsy, BTC-e, and Mintpal were the primary trading venues. Many of these exchanges themselves eventually collapsed (Cryptsy ran off with user funds, BTC-e was seized by the FBI). When an exchange delisted a low-volume altcoin or shut down entirely, liquidity evaporated overnight. No liquidity means no price discovery means no reason for anyone to participate.

51% attacks

Small Scrypt coins were sitting ducks once Scrypt ASICs became available in 2014. A miner with a few machines could overpower the entire network hash rate of coins like Goldcoin or Worldcoin, enabling double-spend attacks. Several coins died directly from repeated 51% attacks that destroyed any remaining confidence.

The survivors: who made it out alive?

Of the dozens of Litecoin forks, only a tiny handful still function in any meaningful capacity in 2026:

Dogecoin — the improbable champion

Dogecoin was created in December 2013 by Billy Markus and Jackson Palmer as an explicit joke. They forked Litecoin (via an intermediate project called Luckycoin), slapped the Shiba Inu meme on it, set the supply to unlimited (after initially capping it), and launched it expecting nothing serious to happen.

What followed was one of the most unlikely success stories in financial history. Dogecoin built a genuine community around tipping, charity (they funded a NASCAR car and the Jamaican bobsled team for the 2014 Olympics), and general internet culture. When Elon Musk started tweeting about it in 2020–2021, it exploded to a market cap exceeding $80 billion.

The technical relationship with Litecoin remains deep. Since August 2014, Dogecoin has been merged-mined with Litecoin — meaning LTC miners simultaneously secure the DOGE network at no additional cost. This was implemented after DOGE’s standalone hash rate became dangerously low, and it effectively makes Litecoin the security backbone of the Dogecoin network.

Feathercoin — the zombie that won’t die

Feathercoin launched in April 2013 and actually had a somewhat competent development team by the standards of the era. They switched from Scrypt to NeoScrypt in 2014 to maintain ASIC resistance, implemented advanced checkpointing to prevent 51% attacks, and maintained development activity for several years. The project still technically exists — the blockchain produces blocks, a handful of nodes operate, and you can even trade it on one or two obscure exchanges. But with a market cap below $500K and essentially zero meaningful transaction volume, it’s a zombie: technically alive but functionally dead.

Vertcoin — the ideological holdout

Vertcoin forked from Litecoin in January 2014 with a specific ideological mission: remain GPU-minable forever, resisting the centralization that ASICs bring. To achieve this, the developers have changed the mining algorithm three times (Scrypt-N to Lyra2RE to Lyra2REv2 to Verthash). This commitment to ASIC resistance has kept a small but dedicated community of GPU miners engaged. The project maintains active development and had a peak market cap of roughly $300M in early 2018. Current market cap hovers below $5M, but unlike most forks on this list, Vertcoin still receives code commits and has an operational mining community.

The Dogecoin paradox

This is the fact that keeps Litecoin maximalists up at night: Dogecoin, forked from Litecoin as an explicit joke with zero original technical innovation, now has a market capitalization roughly 2.5 times that of Litecoin itself. The child surpassed the parent, and it did so without any technical merit whatsoever.

How? Community and culture. Dogecoin captured something that Litecoin never did — a brand identity that resonated with people who don’t care about block times or hash algorithms. The Shiba Inu meme, the friendly community, the celebrity endorsements, and the sheer absurdity of a “joke currency” becoming a multi-billion-dollar asset created a self-reinforcing cycle of attention and capital.

The technical irony is thick: Dogecoin relies on Litecoin miners for its security (via merged mining), uses Litecoin’s Scrypt algorithm, and was built on Litecoin’s codebase. It is, in every technical sense, a derivative of Litecoin. Yet the market values the derivative higher than the original. DOGE is worth 2.5x more than LTC despite being technically a parasite living on Litecoin hashrate. The market prices memes, not architecture — narrative and community matter more than technology, at least for market cap.

Why forks happen: the three motivations

1. Easy money (the vast majority)

Clone the code, change the name, pre-mine or instamine early blocks, create hype on BitcoinTalk, dump your coins on speculators who think they’re “getting in early,” disappear. This playbook was used by dozens of Litecoin forks in 2013 and was recycled in the ICO era (2017), the DeFi fork era (2020), and the memecoin era (2021–present). The technology changes; the grift stays the same.

2. Ideological disagreements

A small number of forks were motivated by genuine technical or philosophical disagreements. Vertcoin exists because its creators believed ASIC resistance was critical for decentralization — a position that Litecoin itself abandoned once Scrypt ASICs arrived. Litecoin Cash (despite being a scam in execution) at least claimed an ideological justification: that old SHA-256 hardware shouldn’t go to waste. Whether you buy the ideology is separate from whether the execution was legitimate.

3. Experimentation

Dogecoin started as an experiment in what would happen if you combined a popular meme with a cryptocurrency. Novacoin experimented with hybrid Proof-of-Work/Proof-of-Stake consensus before that became mainstream. Anoncoin experimented with privacy features years before Monero launched. Some experiments succeed wildly (Dogecoin); most fail. But the experimentation itself was made possible by Litecoin’s open-source, easily forkable codebase.

What the fork graveyard tells us about Litecoin

There’s a counterintuitive argument here: every dead Litecoin fork is actually evidence of Litecoin’s strength. Consider what killed the forks — no development, no community, no security, no unique value. Litecoin has all of those things, and has maintained them continuously for over 14 years.

The forks that died from lack of hash rate security validate Litecoin’s position as the dominant Scrypt chain. The forks that died from lack of development validate Litecoin’s consistent, conservative upgrade path (SegWit, MWEB, Lightning). The forks that died from lack of exchange support validate Litecoin’s universal liquidity across every major exchange globally.

Being the “parent chain” means having battle-tested code that has been running in production for 14+ years without a single consensus failure. Every fork that copied that code and still died proved that code alone isn’t enough — you need the network effects, the development team, and the community that Litecoin built over more than a decade.

The merged mining relationship

One technical relationship deserves special attention: Litecoin’s merged mining with Dogecoin. Since August 2014, LTC miners can simultaneously mine DOGE blocks using the same Scrypt work. This was implemented via Auxiliary Proof-of-Work (AuxPoW) on the Dogecoin side, meaning DOGE blocks can include proof that work was done on the Litecoin chain.

The practical effect: Dogecoin’s security is directly tied to Litecoin’s hash rate. If Litecoin miners collectively stopped merged mining DOGE, the Dogecoin network would lose the majority of its hash power overnight. This creates an interesting dependency where the “child” fork with 2.5x the market cap relies on the “parent” chain for its fundamental security guarantee.

For Litecoin miners, merged mining is essentially free revenue — they earn DOGE transaction fees and block rewards on top of their LTC earnings with negligible additional computational cost. This makes Litecoin mining more profitable than the LTC block reward alone would suggest, which in turn attracts more hash rate, which strengthens both networks. A virtuous cycle.

Could new Litecoin forks succeed today?

The era of trivial Litecoin forks producing viable projects is over, for several reasons:

• Scrypt ASIC dominance: You can’t bootstrap a new Scrypt chain anymore. Existing ASIC farms can 51% attack any new Scrypt coin trivially. You’d need to change the algorithm, at which point you’re not really forking Litecoin’s mining ecosystem — just its wallet code.
• Market saturation: There are 20,000+ cryptocurrencies. The “just fork and launch” strategy doesn’t work when you’re competing with 20,000 other tokens for attention and liquidity.
• Exchange listing standards: Modern exchanges require legal entities, compliance documentation, and demonstrated traction before listing. You can’t just email Cryptsy anymore (Cryptsy doesn’t exist, and the alternatives have standards).
• Network effects are entrenched: Litecoin’s position as the #1 Scrypt chain with full exchange coverage, payment processor integration, and regulatory acceptance means any fork starts from an insurmountable disadvantage.

The only Litecoin fork that could plausibly succeed today would need to bring genuinely novel technology that Litecoin itself refuses to implement — and even then, it would face an uphill battle for adoption. The fork era, at least for Litecoin, is functionally over.

Timeline: the complete fork history

Frequently asked questions

How many forks does Litecoin have?

Counting only documented projects that appeared on at least one exchange or tracking site, Litecoin has spawned approximately 30–40 direct forks. If you include undocumented micro-forks that launched on BitcoinTalk and died within days, the number is likely over 100. The exact count is impossible to determine because many launched before comprehensive tracking existed and left no surviving records.

Is Dogecoin a Litecoin fork?

Yes, technically. Dogecoin was forked from Litecoin’s codebase (via the intermediate project Luckycoin) in December 2013. It uses the same Scrypt mining algorithm and has been merged-mined with Litecoin since August 2014. The Dogecoin network depends on Litecoin miners for the majority of its hash rate security. Despite having a higher market cap, Dogecoin remains technically subordinate to Litecoin in terms of mining infrastructure.

What happened to Litecoin Cash?

Litecoin Cash launched in February 2018 as a hard fork at block 1,371,111, switching from Scrypt to SHA-256 and giving holders 10 LCC per LTC. Charlie Lee publicly called it a scam. The token pumped approximately 3x in the first week on speculative excitement, then crashed over 99%. Development ceased within a year, and the chain is now effectively dead with no exchange listings, no meaningful hash rate, and no active development.

Could another fork of Litecoin succeed today?

Extremely unlikely. The conditions that enabled successful forks in 2013 (no ASICs, easy exchange listings, small competition pool, naive market participants) no longer exist. A new Litecoin fork would face immediate 51% attack risk from existing ASIC farms, inability to get listed on reputable exchanges, and competition from 20,000+ existing tokens. Only genuinely novel technology plus massive community building could make a new fork viable — and at that point, you’re better off building from scratch.

Does Litecoin benefit from having so many forks?

Indirectly, yes. Being heavily forked demonstrates that Litecoin’s code is battle-tested and trusted enough to serve as a foundation. The merged mining relationship with Dogecoin directly benefits LTC miners through additional revenue. And the mass death of competitors eliminates alternatives, cementing Litecoin’s position as the only viable Scrypt-based payment network.

Sources

• Litecoin Foundation — Official documentation and historical records
• BitcoinTalk.org — Original announcement threads for BBQCoin, Feathercoin, Worldcoin, Novacoin, Dogecoin, and other Litecoin forks (2012–2014 archives)
• Charlie Lee Twitter/X — Public warnings about Litecoin Cash (February 2018)
• CoinMarketCap historical data — Peak and current market capitalizations for all listed forks
• Dogecoin Foundation — AuxPoW merged mining implementation documentation (2014)
• GitHub repositories — Codebase analysis of Feathercoin, Vertcoin, Litecoin Cash, and Dogecoin
• Blockchain.info / Blockchair — Chain status verification for dead/zombie forks

See also: The complete history of Litecoin • The altcoin graveyard • How merged mining works • Litecoin network security analysis • Bitcoin vs Litecoin codebase differences