TL;DR

• Litecoin (LTC) leads in non-empty wallets with over 8 million, followed by Dogecoin (DOGE) with 6.69 million.
• Ripple (XRP) and Shiba Inu (SHIB) holders have also been on the rise, recently reaching all-time high numbers.

Here is the Ranking

The crypto analytics platform Santiment revealed the six alternative coins that currently have the most holders on their respective networks.

Litecoin (LTC) leads the pack with almost 8.10 million non-empty wallets, while Dogecoin (DOGE) follows next with 6.69 million. Ripple’s XRP, Cardano’s ADA, Shiba Inu (SHIB), and Chainlink (LINK) are the others included in the ranking. 

Despite topping the list, Litecoin has witnessed a step back as non-empty LTC wallets were around 9.4 million several months ago. On the other hand, XRP and SHIB holders are currently at an all-time high level. As CryptoPotato reported, the number of XRP wallets reached the 5 million milestone at the start of the year and has only been progressing since then.

Shiba Inu might have less holders than its main rival – Dogecoin – but one research entity estimated that it has the strongest and most devoted community. The study was based on the overall number of socially-driven engagements, including likes, retweets, and posts involving SHIB, with the results announced at the end of last year.

DOGE ranked second on that list, whereas Pepe (PEPE), Floki Inu (FLOKI), and Bonk Inu (BONK) were next in line.

Litecoin’s Longevity

The cryptocurrency’s aforementioned achievement could be explained by the fact that it saw the light of day over a decade ago. It was created by Charlie Lee and released in October 2011 to provide an alternative to Bitcoin with faster transactions. Litecoin has a block time of approximately 2.5 minutes compared to BTC’s 10 minutes.

It also has a capacity for up to 50 transactions per second, whereas the primary cryptocurrency can handle up to seven transactions for the same period. 

Similar to BTC, Litecoin employs a halving mechanism to reduce in half the daily issuance of new tokens. The event occurs approximately every four years (or every 840,000 blocks), with the latest one happening in August last year. Back then, the miners’ rewards were cut from 12.5 LTC to 6.25 LTC. 

The halving is usually a precursor of a price uptrend. Recall that LTC spiked to almost $110 in March this year before retreating in the past few months. Currently, it is worth around $68 (CoinGecko’s data).