Litecoin wallet guide: LTC addresses, MWEB and receiving a swap

What a Litecoin wallet does

A Litecoin wallet stores the private keys that control your LTC; the coins are recorded on the Litecoin blockchain, which works on the same UTXO model as Bitcoin. Your wallet creates a recovery phrase when you set it up, and from it every address and key the wallet will ever use. Anyone who has the phrase controls the coins, so write it down offline and never type it into a website, a chat or a swap form. A swap service never needs it: to receive LTC you only share an address.

• Many wallets, Cake Wallet among them, rotate to a fresh receiving address; every address still belongs to the same wallet.
• A “wallet” on an exchange is an account: the exchange holds the keys, not you.

Litecoin address types: L, M, 3, ltc1 and ltcmweb1

Litecoin has four everyday address formats on its main chain and one for MWEB. In Litecoin Core’s source code, normal pay-to-public-key-hash addresses use the version byte that produces an L, script (P2SH) addresses use two version bytes, one producing M and an older one producing 3, native SegWit addresses use the human-readable prefix ltc, and MWEB addresses use ltcmweb. All of them can hold LTC; they differ in fees, compatibility and privacy.

• L…: legacy address, the original format.
• M… and 3…: script (P2SH) addresses; 3 uses the same version byte as Bitcoin’s P2SH addresses, so the two look alike.
• ltc1…: native SegWit (bech32) address; the standard address in wallets such as Cake Wallet.
• ltcmweb1…: MWEB address on Litecoin’s privacy extension block; only MWEB-capable wallets show or send to it.

Which Litecoin address to use for a swap payout

VeriSwap pays LTC to L, M, 3 or ltc1 addresses. MWEB addresses starting with ltcmweb1 are not accepted. If you want your LTC to end up in MWEB, receive the payout at your wallet’s ordinary ltc1 address and then peg it in from your own wallet. Because a 3 address looks the same as a Bitcoin P2SH address, check that you copied it from the Litecoin side of your wallet: an order form can confirm the format, not which network the address belongs to.

• Cake Wallet: on the receive screen choose Standard, not Private (MWEB).
• Litecoin Core: leave “Generate MWEB address” unticked when you create the receiving address.
• Exchange deposit: use the address the exchange gives for Litecoin network deposits.

MWEB in a wallet: pegging in and out

MWEB (MimbleWimble Extension Blocks) is Litecoin’s optional privacy layer, active since May 2022. It runs as an extension block alongside each normal block, and inside it amounts are hidden. Moving coins from a normal address into MWEB is called pegging in; moving them back to a normal address is pegging out. In Cake Wallet both are ordinary sends: send from your Standard balance to your own ltcmweb1 address to peg in, or from your Private balance to an ltc1 address to peg out. Litecoin’s consensus rules lock peg-out outputs for 6 blocks, and Cake Wallet says peg-ins and peg-outs each wait six confirmations before the funds appear on the other side. Payments that stay inside MWEB have no such wait.

• Six blocks at about 2.5 minutes each is roughly 15 minutes for a peg to settle.
• The amount crossing in or out of MWEB is visible on the main chain; what happens inside is not.
• Trezor Suite can spend LTC received from an MWEB peg-out but cannot send to MWEB addresses.

Choosing a Litecoin wallet

Pick a wallet that is maintained, comes from its official site or app store, and supports the features you need: MWEB, a hardware device, or simply a phone app. The wallets below appear in the Litecoin Foundation’s wallet directory on litecoin.com; what each one does comes from its own documentation.

• Litecoin Core: the full-node reference wallet from the Litecoin project for desktop computers; it downloads and checks the whole chain and can create MWEB addresses. The current release is 0.21.5.8 (September 2026).
• Nexus Wallet: the Litecoin Foundation’s own mobile wallet for iOS and Android, released in June 2025, with MWEB private payments and Tor.
• Cake Wallet: an open-source multi-coin wallet from Cake Labs; it tracks ltc1 and ltcmweb1 addresses, and MWEB works on iOS and Android only, not on its desktop versions.
• Electrum-LTC: a light desktop wallet for Windows, macOS and Linux that uses a seed phrase and remote servers; its website lists 4.2.2.1 from June 2022 as the latest release.
• Edge and other multi-coin apps also hold LTC; check whether they show MWEB before relying on it.
• Choose Litecoin Core if you want to verify everything yourself, a mobile wallet with MWEB if you want private payments on your phone, Electrum-LTC for a light desktop wallet, and a hardware wallet for larger amounts.

Ledger and Trezor for Litecoin

Ledger and Trezor both support LTC and keep the private keys on the device; every transaction is approved on its screen. Ledger manages Litecoin in its Ledger Wallet app. Trezor manages it in Trezor Suite and says its devices secure the keys for standard Litecoin addresses, with limited MWEB support: you can spend LTC that reached you from MWEB, but you cannot send to an MWEB address. If MWEB matters to you, check the device maker’s current support pages before you buy, and keep MWEB funds in a wallet that supports it.

Restoring a wallet and missing balances

Most “my LTC is missing” cases after a restore are address-type problems, not lost coins. A wallet only shows balances on the address types it scans. Cake Wallet, for example, tracks only native SegWit ltc1 addresses and MWEB addresses; if the same recovery phrase received coins at L or M addresses in another wallet, Cake will not show them, and you need the original wallet to move them. A freshly restored Cake wallet also starts with MWEB switched off, so its Private balance stays hidden until you enable MWEB and let it sync. Some wallets ask you to pick a derivation path during restore and show the balance found on each.

• Restore in the same wallet that created the phrase if anything looks missing.
• Litecoin Core does not restore from a BIP39 word list, so back up its wallet file.

Litecoin fees: litoshis per byte

A Litecoin fee is not a percentage of the amount. It is a rate multiplied by the size of the transaction in virtual bytes, and the size depends on how many inputs and outputs it has and on the address types involved. Fees are counted in litoshis: one litoshi is 0.00000001 LTC, so 1 LTC is 100,000,000 litoshis. Litecoin Core’s default minimum wallet fee rate is 10,000 litoshis per 1,000 virtual bytes, which is 10 litoshis per vbyte; at that rate a 200-vbyte transaction pays 2,000 litoshis, or 0.00002 LTC. Wallets raise the rate when blocks are full. When you send LTC to a swap your wallet pays this fee; for an LTC payout, VeriSwap pays the network fee.

• Many small incoming payments mean many inputs later, so consolidating them costs a fee once.
• Cake Wallet offers Slow and Fast fee levels: slower is cheaper but may take longer to confirm.

Block time and confirmations

Litecoin targets one block every 2.5 minutes, a quarter of Bitcoin’s 10 minutes, and adjusts mining difficulty every 3.5 days to hold that pace. A payment is confirmed once it is in a block, and each later block adds a confirmation. How many confirmations a wallet, exchange or swap waits for is its own choice; MWEB peg-outs have a fixed network rule of 6 blocks before they can be spent.

Receiving LTC from a swap

Open your wallet’s receive screen, choose a standard address (ltc1 in most wallets) and paste it into the payout field. Compare the first and last characters before you create the order. The order shows one receive amount with the 0.5% service fee already included, valid for 15 minutes, with a 50 USD minimum, and there is no account to create. The operator verifies your deposit by hand and then sends the payout; your wallet shows it once it sees the transaction, and it gains confirmations with each new block.

• BTC → LTC, XMR → LTC and USDT → LTC: payout to L, M, 3 or ltc1 only.
• Exchange addresses work if the exchange credits LTC deposits from outside senders.
• Save the order reference; the private order page logs each step.

Sending LTC to a swap

Send LTC on the Litecoin network to the deposit address on your order, for the exact amount shown, within the 15-minute quote window, and leave enough in the wallet for the fee. If your coins sit in MWEB and the deposit address is a normal Litecoin address, the send is a peg-out: in Cake Wallet it is the same Send screen, but a peg-out output can only be spent on the main chain after six blocks, so the deposit takes longer to become usable than a normal payment. Never send LTC from another network, such as a token called LTC on BNB Smart Chain, to a Litecoin deposit address.

• LTC → BTC pays Bitcoin to a 1, 3 or bc1 address.
• LTC → XMR pays Monero to your own Monero wallet.
• LTC → USDT pays Tether on Ethereum, TRON or Solana; pick the network that matches your USDT wallet.

Litecoin wallet lookup: checking an address in an explorer

A “Litecoin wallet lookup” means pasting an address or transaction ID into a block explorer, such as Litecoin Space, which the Litecoin Foundation links from litecoin.com. For an L, M, 3 or ltc1 address the explorer shows every payment in and out and the current balance of that one address, because the main chain is public. It cannot show a whole wallet, since a wallet uses many addresses, and it cannot show MWEB balances or the amounts of MWEB payments. To check a swap payout, copy the payout transaction ID from your order page, search for it, and confirm that the receiving address matches the one you entered and that confirmations are counting up.

• Payment visible in the explorer but not in the wallet: the wallet is still syncing or looking at another account.
• An extended public key (xpub or Ltub) lets a watch-only wallet show your whole standard balance; anyone who has it sees your history, so do not share it.

Mistakes to avoid

Most Litecoin wallet problems come from address types and networks.

• Pasting an ltcmweb1 MWEB address where only L, M, 3 or ltc1 is accepted.
• Pasting a Bitcoin 3… address into an LTC field: it has the same format, so only you can catch it.
• Treating LTC on BNB Smart Chain as Litecoin: it is a BEP-20 token at an 0x address, not coins on the Litecoin network.
• Restoring a phrase in a wallet that does not scan the address type your coins are on.
• Expecting a peg-out from MWEB to arrive as fast as a normal payment.
• Typing the recovery phrase anywhere other than the wallet itself.