Litecoin Cash successfully hard forks off from Litecoin's blockchain

The Litecoin blockchain was successfully hardforked for the first time ever, leading to the creation of a new cryptocurrency "Litecoin Cash". The new coin has no affiliation with Litecoin's team and is only a fork of their code and blockchain.
Litecoin's blockchain split on Sunday to produce a new digital token litecoin cash (LCC). Every litecoin holder was awarded 10 LCC for each LTC owned, at the time of the hard fork. The coin got off to a good start and gained a trading volume of over $2.8 million on YoBit within 24 hours.

Interestingly, the coin had a controversial repute even before its launch. Litecoin founder Charlie Lee tweeted his views on the token on the same day its launch announcement was made. He stated that the fork was not being conducted by him or other members of the Litecoin team. Lee went as far as to call it a scam.

This skepticism, however, did not get in the way of the progress of this newly forked coin. Launched at an initial price of $1.44 per token, litecoin cash grew to an impressive $4.27 the very next day. The main difference between Litecoin and Litecoin Cash is that the former is based on the Scrypt mining protocol, while the latter utilizes the SHA256 hashing algorithm.

Other notable SHA256 coins are bitcoin cash and the crypto-king, bitcoin itself. Both of these have a 10-minute block time. On the other hand, Litecoin cash has a much smaller block time of only 2.5 minutes. In addition to having a much faster transaction-processing rate, Litecoin cash's transaction fees are expected to be less than those of Litecoin by around 90%.

In response to Lee’s criticism, the LCC team sent out a tweet offering clarification. They pointed out that Litecoin Cash indeed has no affiliation with Litecoin's team and is only a fork of their code and blockchain.

Litecoin Cash’s official website also states that the coin's name includes ‘litecoin’ simply because Litecoin is their parent blockchain. They added that hardforks have become quite common in the cryptocurrency space now, and prefixing the parent chain’s name with the forked coin has become customary.

Meanwhile, Litecoin itself has also seen notable growth over the past week. The fifth largest cryptocurrency surged by about 30% just days before the LCC fork took place, and is currently trading at $245. Some analysts even associate this hard fork with the coin’s sudden surge in price.

Considering the fact that the split awarded each litecoin holder with free LCC tokens, this is a good guess. Only four crypto exchanges are listing the coin at this initial stage. These are Yobit, MercatoX, TradeSatoshi, MeanXTrade, and CryptoBridge.