(Note: I wrote this last Tuesday, but held off publishing because no exchanges actually allowed Litecoin Cash (LCC) deposits, making this process pointless. There is now one exchange allowing LCC deposits and trades (see step 3 of the article), so it’s finally possible to unload your LCC by following this guide.)

This past Sunday, the Litecoin (LTC) blockchain was hard-forked to create a new coin called Litecoin Cash (LCC), in much the same way that Bitcoin Cash was created back in August of last year. Many in the cryptocurrency community consider forks like these to be simple cash grabs at best, and potential scams at worst. In a sane world, Litecoin Cash should be nearly worthless—but the cryptocurrency space is still saturated with people trying to strike it rich on “the next Bitcoin/Litecoin/Ethereum”, and the prospect of buying up what they perceive as Litecoin 2.0 for a fraction of the cost of the real thing must seem really appealing.

At least, that’s certainly the way it seems, given that the price of Litecoin Cash has increased about 500% since its creation roughly 48 hours ago. A single LCC coin is worth nearly $10 on YoBit.net, the only exchange that is currently supporting LCC as far as I can tell. Given that the LCC hard fork created 10 times as many coins as there were on the original LTC blockchain (e.g.: for every 1 Litecoin, the fork created 10 Litecoin Cash coins), this is an objectively absurd valuation that should hopefully sort itself out as people start to think more critically about essentially creating copies of wealth (update 2/25: the price on YoBit.net is down to ~$6, but deposits aren’t allowed—CryptoBridge does support deposits and trading, but the price of LCC is hovering around one dollar there).

But in the meantime, those of us holding Litecoin at the time of the fork now also have some Litecoin Cash (10x as much, to be exact—if you had 10 LTC when the fork occurred, you now also have 100 LCC). Given the current price of LCC, this is a great opportunity to dump your forked coins and pick up some essentially free LTC (or ETH, BTC, USD…).

Read on for a basic guide on how to safely sell your LCC.

I’m going to assume that most of you reading this have your Litecoin wallet backed up securely in the manner that I recommended back in my 2013 guide, and are using a Windows-based PC. If you’re using a third-party wallet, or a hardware wallet like the Ledger Nano S, you’ll still need to follow all of the steps, but the details of exactly how to accomplish each step will vary a bit. If you keep your Litecoin on an exchange (e.g.: Coinbase, etc), then you’re at the mercy of the exchange as to whether or not they want to award you with the LCC that was forked from your LTC (also, stop storing your cryptocurrency on exchanges!).

Step 1: Move all of your existing LTC to a NEW wallet

This step is important. No, really—do not skip this step! This is the step that protects your existing Litecoins from theft in case it turns out that LCC was a scam designed to steal LTC private keys. To access your LCC coins, you’ll need to provide the private keys protecting your original LTC wallet to the LCC client software. Since the LCC client is closed-source, nobody can independently verify that it isn’t transmitting your private keys to some third party (where they could then be used to empty your LTC wallet). The best way to protect yourself in this scenario is to make sure that your LTC wallet is already empty when you provide your keys to the LCC client.

To do this, download the latest version of Litecoin Core and install it on your PC. Open it and let the blockchain sync—this can take a long time on a fresh install, just let it happen in the background. Note that we haven’t imported our private keys yet—if you already had Litecoin Core installed, make sure your private keys (wallet.dat file) is not present—we want to start the client with a brand new wallet file.

When Litecoin Core indicates that the blockchain has finished syncing, you should see a zero balance indicated. Go to settings -> encrypt wallet and pick a good passphrase that you can remember (if you lose your passphrase, you lose access to your wallet permanently!). Litecoin Core will restart. When it reopens, go to file -> receiving addresses. There should be a single Litecoin address listed. Copy it to the clipboard and save it somewhere. This will be the new LTC address that you’re going to transfer all of your existing LTC into. After you’ve made a note of your new LTC address (you’ll need it in a few minutes), close Litecoin Core.

Now we need to make a backup of our new private keys. Navigate to the following directory:

C:\Users\%username%\AppData\Roaming\Litecoin\

You should see a wallet.dat file here with today’s date/timestamp. These are the encrypted keys necessary to access the LTC wallet you just created. Make multiple backups of this file, and keep them stored in multiple offline locations (I strongly recommend reading my original guide on wallet security if you haven’t already).

Once your new wallet is secure, it’s time to transfer your existing LTC to it. Retrieve your wallet.dat file containing the private keys to your existing LTC wallet (e.g.: from USB sticks, or wherever you’ve been keeping them) and place it in your C:\Users\%username%\AppData\Roaming\Litecoin\ directory (overwriting the wallet.dat file that we just created).

Open Litecoin Core again, and when it finishes re-scanning you should see a balance indicative of however many LTC you own. Send the entirety of your LTC balance to the new address that you created earlier. If you’re nervous, or you’ve never sent LTC before, it’s a good idea to try a small test first (e.g.: send 0.1 LTC and confirm that it arrives safely). Keep in mind that it’ll take a few minutes for the transaction to confirm. When you’re finished, you can close Litecoin Core—you’ve successfully moved all of your LTC into a new, secure wallet that we don’t have to reveal to the Litecoin Cash client!

Before moving on to the next step, make a copy of the wallet.dat file in your C:\Users\%username%\AppData\Roaming\Litecoin\ directory and keep it someplace handy. Just to be clear, this is your old, now empty Litecoin wallet. We’ll need the private keys from it to access your forked LCC coins in the next step.

Step 2: Download the Litecoin Cash client

Open up your browser, head over to https://litecoinca.sh/, download whichever client is appropriate for your OS, and install it. Make sure to specify a custom data directory that doesn’t conflict with your Litecoin Core installation.

Again, when you open the LCC client for the first time, you’ll need to wait for it to sync, which will take quite some time. When it’s done, close the application and move your old Litecoin wallet.dat into the Litecoin Cash data directory (wherever you specified during installation). You’ll see an existing wallet.dat file there that the LCC application created on its first execution—it’s safe to delete (e.g.: just overwrite it with your old LTC wallet.dat).

Go ahead and re-open the Litecoin Cash application, and now you should see a balance equal to ten times your original Litecoin holdings. You’re going to send this LCC balance to an exchange and trade it for something useful (e.g.: real LTC, ETH, BTC, etc). Leave the LCC client open and continue to the next step.

Step 3: Send your new LCC to an exchange

As of right now, YoBit.net is the only exchange that I’m aware of that supports LCC, so you’ll need an account there. (Update 2/25: YoBit has LCC listed, but deposits are disabled, meaning there is no way to actually transfer your LCC to them currently. CryptoBridge does support LCC deposits and trading, so it’s possible to sell your LCC with them right now, albeit at a much lower price than YoBit is listing. Most likely, whenever YoBit does enable LCC deposits, the price will crash pretty quickly as everyone with LCC rushes to sell it.)

After you’ve created an account on YoBit and logged in, click on “Wallets” in the top navigation header. Use the search box to search for “LCC” and you should see it appear, with options to deposit and withdraw. Click on the “deposit” button to generate a new address. Copy the address that’s assigned to you, and switch back to your open Litecoin Cash application. Click the “send” button, and paste the YoBit deposit address. Again, it’s always a good idea to perform a small test transaction first so that you can verify everything works properly. When you see your small test transaction arrive safely in your YoBit account, go ahead and transfer the rest.

Once all of your LCC is in your YoBit account, go ahead and trade it for whatever cryptocurrency you like! After you receive your coin(s) of choice, you can transfer out to your own private wallet (or to Coinbase to sell for USD, etc).

Step 4: Clean up

When you’re finished, you can go ahead and uninstall the Litecoin Cash application, and delete its data directory (which is storing ~15 GB of blockchain data that you no longer need). Assuming you sent all of your LCC to an exchange and never plan to deal with LCC again, it’s safe to delete your original Litecoin wallet.dat file (as the new wallet you created in step 1 now contains all of your LTC, and this old wallet should be considered compromised since it’s been exposed to an untrusted application).