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+0.2% +0.09 $
A litoshi is the smallest unit of Litecoin: one hundred-millionth of an LTC. Here's how Litecoin's denominations work, why divisibility matters, and where the litoshi actually shows up in practice.
A litoshi is the smallest unit of Litecoin. One LTC splits into exactly 100,000,000 of them, the same eight-decimal structure Bitcoin uses for its satoshis. That single fact answers most of the question, but the details around it are genuinely useful: how fees get priced, why a coin needs to be divisible at all, and what happens when an amount gets so small it's not worth moving. This guide covers all of it in a few minutes of reading.
1 LTC = 100,000,000 litoshis. Written as a decimal, one litoshi is 0.00000001 LTC, ten to the minus eighth power.
The name follows community convention rather than anything in Litecoin's code. Bitcoin's smallest unit got named after its pseudonymous creator, Satoshi Nakamoto, and Litecoin users borrowed the pattern: lito + shi. Charlie Lee didn't decree it. Nobody did. It just stuck, more or less, in forums and documentation over the years.
"More or less" is doing real work in that sentence, and we'll get to why.
| Unit | Value in LTC | Litoshis | Actually used? |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 LTC | 1.00000000 | 100,000,000 | Yes, constantly |
| 1 mLTC (millilitecoin, sometimes "lite") | 0.001 | 100,000 | Rarely; some wallets offer it as a display option |
| 1 µLTC (microlitecoin) | 0.000001 | 100 | Almost never |
| 1 litoshi | 0.00000001 | 1 | Mostly in fee settings and technical docs |
Time for some honesty. Bitcoin has a genuine "sats" culture: people quote prices in sats, wallets have sats-mode toggles, "stacking sats" is a verb phrase with its own merchandise. Litecoin has nothing comparable. You will almost never hear someone quote a coffee in litoshis, and the intermediate units (mLTC, µLTC) exist mainly as dropdown options in a handful of wallets. In day-to-day use, people talk in whole LTC and decimals of LTC, full stop. The litoshi earns its keep in exactly one place: the technical plumbing. Which, conveniently, is the next section.
A currency that can't be split finely enough stops working for small payments. Divisibility solves three practical problems at once.
Sub-cent fees become expressible. A typical Litecoin transaction fee is a tiny fraction of a cent. You can't write "0.3 cents" in a system whose smallest unit is a whole coin worth tens of dollars. With eight decimal places, a fee of a few thousand litoshis is a perfectly ordinary number the protocol can handle.
Price appreciation doesn't break payments. Suppose LTC's price multiplied by 100. Whole coins would become impractical for daily spending, but litoshis would simply become the natural unit for small amounts. The granularity is already built in, waiting. This was the explicit design logic Bitcoin started with, and Litecoin inherited it wholesale.
The total supply is enormous at the base layer. Litecoin caps out at 84 million LTC. Multiply by 100 million litoshis each and you get 8.4 quadrillion litoshis, or 8,400,000,000,000,000. That's the true integer supply the software actually counts in. The "84 million" figure is just that number with a decimal point inserted for human comfort.
That last point deserves a beat. Under the hood, Litecoin's software doesn't do decimal math at all. Every balance and every transaction amount is stored as a whole number of litoshis. The decimal point you see in your wallet is pure presentation.
Two places, mainly.
Fees on Litecoin are priced in litoshis per virtual byte (vByte), a measure of how much space your transaction occupies in a block. A transaction isn't charged by its value; a $5 payment and a $50,000 payment of the same structural complexity cost roughly the same to send. Your wallet estimates a competitive rate, multiplies by your transaction's size, and quotes you the total. Because Litecoin blocks are rarely congested, that rate tends to sit very low, which is part of why the fee ends up as a small litoshi count rather than anything you'd notice in fiat terms.
Nearly every Litecoin wallet shows balances in LTC with eight decimal places: 1.50000000, 0.04217833, and so on. Those trailing digits are litoshis. A balance of 0.00000001 LTC is one litoshi, the smallest amount the network can represent. Some wallets let you switch the display unit to mLTC or litoshis, but the default is decimal LTC almost everywhere.
Same idea, different chains, different values. A satoshi is the smallest unit of Bitcoin; a litoshi is the smallest unit of Litecoin. They're not interchangeable and not worth the same amount, because BTC and LTC trade at wildly different prices. Sending satoshis to a Litecoin address isn't a thing, and vice versa. The naming similarity trips up beginners constantly, which is fair, since the resemblance is deliberate.
Depends entirely on the price of LTC, so treat the following as a worked example, not a live quote. Say LTC trades at $80. One litoshi is then worth $80 ÷ 100,000,000 = $0.0000008. Flip it around: $1 ÷ $0.0000008 = 1,250,000 litoshis per dollar. If the price doubles to $160, a dollar buys 625,000 litoshis. The math is always price divided into 100 million; only the price changes.
Here's a wrinkle divisibility creates. Because spending a coin costs a fee based on transaction size, an output can be so small that spending it costs more than it's worth. These uneconomical crumbs are called dust. Node software enforces a dust limit, a threshold below which standard transactions won't relay, precisely to stop the network filling up with outputs nobody will ever rationally spend. The exact threshold depends on relay policy and output type, but the principle is fixed: a handful of litoshis sitting alone in an output is effectively stranded.
Dust has a darker use, too. In a dust attack, someone sprays tiny amounts at thousands of addresses, then watches the blockchain to see which dust outputs later get combined with other coins in a spend. That clustering can help link addresses to a single owner and chip away at privacy. Most modern wallets let you freeze or ignore dust for exactly this reason. If a few stray litoshis appear in your wallet uninvited, the safe move is to leave them alone.
One litoshi is real, in the sense that the ledger can record it. Meaningful is another matter. At any plausible LTC price, a single litoshi is worth a minuscule fraction of a cent, and the dust limit means you couldn't send it by itself anyway. The smallest practical amount is whatever clears the dust threshold and justifies its own fee, which in normal conditions is still comfortably under a cent. That's the quiet achievement of eight-decimal divisibility: the floor on a useful payment is set by network policy and fees, not by the unit itself.
A litoshi is the smallest unit of Litecoin, equal to 0.00000001 LTC (one hundred-millionth of a coin). The name is a community convention modeled on Bitcoin's satoshi. Litecoin's software actually accounts for all amounts in whole litoshis; the decimal LTC figure in your wallet is a display convention.
Exactly 100,000,000. One litoshi is 0.00000001 LTC, mirroring the satoshi-to-bitcoin ratio. Across Litecoin's maximum supply of 84 million LTC, that works out to a total of 8.4 quadrillion litoshis.
Rarely. Unlike Bitcoin's well-established sats culture, litoshi terminology mostly lives in technical contexts: fee rates quoted in litoshis per vByte, developer documentation, and the occasional wallet display setting. Everyday Litecoin users overwhelmingly quote amounts in LTC with decimals.
No. They follow the same design (one hundred-millionth of a coin) but belong to different blockchains. A satoshi is a unit of Bitcoin, a litoshi is a unit of Litecoin, and their dollar values differ because BTC and LTC have different market prices.
Not in practice. Network dust limits block outputs so small that spending them would cost more in fees than they're worth, and a single litoshi falls far below that threshold. The smallest amount you can realistically send is whatever exceeds the dust limit plus a reasonable fee, which is still well under a cent in normal conditions.
