51.94 $
-1.35% -0.71 $
51.94 $
-1.35% -0.71 $
Litecoin's proof-of-work payroll, added up in dollars: a shrinking subsidy, fees that pay for nothing, and a Dogecoin sponsor covering most of the bill.
Every proof-of-work chain has a payroll problem baked into its future, and Litecoin's arrives on a schedule you can read off a calendar. Around July or August 2027, the block subsidy halves again. Then 2031. Then 2035. Each cut removes half the coins that currently pay for the hashrate, and nobody gets a vote. So let's do what almost nobody bothers to do: add up who actually pays for Litecoin's security, in dollars, and watch what happens to that number as the subsidy walks down the staircase.
Short version: the math is less frightening than the doomers claim and less comfortable than the fans admit. And the biggest line item on the payroll isn't Litecoin at all.
Start with the subsidy. Since the August 2, 2023 halving, every Litecoin block mints 6.25 LTC. Blocks arrive every 2.5 minutes on average, which works out to 576 blocks a day. Multiply and you get roughly 3,600 LTC of fresh issuance daily.
Now price it. LTC trades around $52 as I write this in late August 2026 (check the number yourself; it'll have moved by the time you read this). At that price:
That $68 million is what the network pays, in diluted holder value, to keep an estimated 2.7–2.8 PH/s of Scrypt hardware pointed at it. The figure moves tick-for-tick with price. At $100 LTC the security budget doubles without a single new miner plugging in. At $26 it halves. Keep that elasticity in mind, because it matters more than any of the halvings do on a month-to-month basis.
The textbook answer to a shrinking subsidy is that transaction fees replace it. On Litecoin, that replacement is not happening. It isn't even starting.
A typical Litecoin block today carries somewhere in the range of a few hundredths of an LTC in total fees, often less. Network-wide, my estimate is on the order of 10–30 LTC per day in fees against 3,600 LTC of subsidy. Call it well under one percent of miner revenue. Some days it rounds to zero decimal places. Blocks run mostly empty, block space demand is low, and the fee chart over the past five years is a flat line with occasional spam-driven spikes that decay within weeks.
I'm labeling those figures as estimates because per-block fees bounce around, but the order of magnitude isn't in dispute. Fees pay for approximately nothing. If you removed them entirely tomorrow, no miner would notice.
Here's where the accounting gets interesting. Since 2014, Dogecoin has been merge-mined with Litecoin via AuxPoW. Every serious Scrypt mining operation mines both chains simultaneously with the same hashes, at no extra cost. Which means the real security budget of the Scrypt fleet is the sum of both payrolls.
Dogecoin pays 10,000 DOGE per block, blocks arrive roughly every minute, so about 1,440 blocks and 14.4 million DOGE per day. At roughly $0.07 per DOGE:
Sit with that. At today's prices, Dogecoin pays the combined Scrypt fleet roughly five times what Litecoin does. Litecoin's subsidy is about 16% of the joint revenue stream. The machines securing Litecoin are, by revenue weight, Dogecoin miners that timestamp Litecoin on the side.
And there's a structural kicker: DOGE never halves. Its 10,000-per-block emission is fixed forever, which means its inflation rate declines as supply grows but its coin-denominated payout to miners doesn't shrink on a schedule. Litecoin's does. Every four years, LTC's slice of the pie gets cut in half while DOGE's stays the same size in coin terms.
This is Litecoin's quiet subsidy and also its quiet dependency. If DOGE's price collapses or the merge-mining relationship ever breaks, the economics of the fleet change overnight. I've written up that failure mode separately in the merge-mining stress test nobody runs. For today's question, the point is simpler: when you model Litecoin's future security budget, you're mostly modeling Dogecoin's price.
Here's the subsidy schedule from launch through the late 2030s. The dollar column holds LTC at a constant $52 reference price purely to isolate the effect of the halvings. That's an accounting device, not a forecast; price will do whatever it does.
| Halving era | Subsidy (LTC) | Daily issuance (LTC) | Daily USD at $52 (ref.) |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2023–2027 | 6.25 | 3,600 | $187,200 |
| 2027–2031 | 3.125 | 1,800 | $93,600 |
| 2031–2035 | 1.5625 | 900 | $46,800 |
| 2035–2039 | 0.78125 | 450 | $23,400 |
Read the table left to right and the problem states itself. For Litecoin's dollar-denominated contribution to security to merely stand still, the LTC price has to roughly double every four years, forever. Or fees have to grow from nothing into something, and after fifteen years of flat fee revenue there's no trend suggesting they will.
Bitcoin has the exact same structural equation, by the way. Its defenders point to fee revenue, which is real but volatile and still a modest share of miner income in most months. Neither chain has solved this. Bitcoin just has more zeros and a louder fee market. Anyone telling you this is a Litecoin-specific flaw is selling something; anyone telling you it's solved is selling something else.
Here's where I'll push back on the collapse narrative, because I've watched this cycle play out across three halvings and it's boring every time. Hashrate follows revenue with a lag. When revenue per hash drops, the oldest and least efficient rigs go dark first, difficulty adjusts down, and the remaining fleet returns to margin. The chain keeps producing blocks throughout, a little slower for a stretch after a big revenue drop until the next 2,016-block difficulty retarget catches up. Nothing halts.
Security doesn't fall off a cliff. It leaks. A smaller budget rents less hashrate, and less hashrate means the cost of attacking the chain declines in proportion. Gradually. An attacker still needs to acquire or build a majority of a specialized ASIC fleet that has no use outside Scrypt mining, which stays expensive and conspicuous even at half today's hashrate. The honest statement is that each halving lowers the attack cost somewhat, not that any single halving makes an attack practical. Anyone quoting a specific date when Litecoin becomes attackable is guessing and dressing it up.
And Litecoin has a cushion Bitcoin doesn't: the DOGE anchor. Because Dogecoin's emission never halves, the combined Scrypt budget declines much more slowly than Litecoin's own subsidy does. Run the 2027 numbers at today's prices: LTC drops to 1,800 LTC/day, about $94,000, while DOGE still pays its million. Litecoin's share of fleet revenue falls from roughly 16% to roughly 8%, but the fleet's total paycheck barely moves. The hashrate protecting Litecoin is substantially rented from Dogecoin's inflation schedule. That's a strange sentence to type. It's also just true.
Scenarios, with the conditions attached. Not predictions.
My own read, held loosely: through 2031 the DOGE anchor does most of the work and the security budget stays adequate unless both coins bleed out together. Past 2035, Litecoin's own contribution becomes small enough that the merge-mining dependency stops being a footnote and becomes the whole story. Which means the right thing to watch isn't the halving countdown. It's the DOGE chart and the fee chart, in that order.
Roughly 3,600 LTC per day in block subsidy, which at about $52 per LTC is around $187,000 daily or $68 million a year. The figure scales directly with price. Fees add well under 1% on top.
Expected around July or August 2027, at block 3,360,000. The subsidy drops from 6.25 to 3.125 LTC per block, cutting daily issuance from about 3,600 to about 1,800 LTC. Miner revenue from LTC halves in coin terms overnight; what it does in dollars depends entirely on price.
The attack cost falls gradually as hashrate falls, but attacking requires majority control of a specialized Scrypt ASIC fleet with no use outside Scrypt mining, which remains costly and visible. Merged Dogecoin rewards keep the fleet paid even as LTC's subsidy shrinks. There's no known date at which an attack becomes cheap, and anyone naming one is speculating.
No. Fees are an estimated 10–30 LTC per day against 3,600 LTC of subsidy, under 1% of miner revenue. Fee income has shown no growth trend in years. Today, fees are economically irrelevant to miners.
At current prices, yes, by a wide margin. Merged mining pays the same Scrypt fleet about 14.4 million DOGE daily, roughly $1 million at $0.07, versus Litecoin's roughly $187,000. Dogecoin supplies about five-sixths of the fleet's income, and unlike LTC's subsidy, DOGE's per-block payout never halves.
