Litecoin [LTC] has been among the top-performing cryptos in 2023, jumping by as much as 33% since the start of the year, data from CoinMarketCap revealed.

Because of the price surge, mining activity has picked up decisively on the network. As per Coinwarz, LTC’s hash rate was 765.12 TH/s at the time of writing, an increase of over 30% over the previous month. The network’s overall mining difficulty also rose in the same period.

A higher hashrate is a positive signal as it means that there are more miners on the network, thus making it more secure.

However, they can have negative impacts on the environment because of the increase in the amount of energy required for mining. This factor acts as a major scaling constraint for blockchains, due to which a lot of them shift to the proof-of-stake (PoS) algorithms.