Welcome to Slate Sundays, CryptoSlate’s new weekly feature showcasing in-depth interviews, expert analysis, and thought-provoking op-eds that go beyond the headlines to explore the ideas and voices shaping the future of crypto.
Hands up if you’ve heard of Luckycoin.
If it sounds familiar, you’re either an industry OG since the days of the Silk Road and Satoshi Dice, or a shiny new-wave crypto-curious with a penchant for collectors’ coins.
Why? Because Luckycoin dates all the way back to 2013, a veritable lifetime in the history of crypto, when Bitcoin was fun and the conversations took place on forums rather than shiny conference halls.
Think more Bitcoin scaling, BTC bubbles, nefarious actors, and software bugs; less Bitcoin ETFs, treasuries, presidential pumps, and strategic reserves.
But back to Lucky.
As a fork of Litecoin, one of the original altcoins in Bitcoin’s wake, Luckycoin was the 22nd coin created and listed on CoinMarketCap.
If you look at its price history today, it resembles a stalagmite. Even if it weren’t for Luckycoin’s anonymous creator and random winning tokenomics, this chart alone tells a story, and not the usual one you’ve come to expect.
So, take my hand and let me guide you through the twists and turns of Luckycoin’s journey. It’s a tale fraught with epic highs, crushing lows, and a decade-long slumber to rival Sleeping Beauty’s, and see the Bitcoin lineage memecoin emerge like a “phoenix from the ashes” to claim its rightful place as a revived piece of crypto history.
Let’s begin.
From anonymous beginnings to the Doge-father
Luckycoin was cut from the same cloth as Bitcoin, created by an anonymous developer known as “LuckyC.” Just as Satoshi Nakamoto did with Bitcoin, LuckyC embedded the financial headline of the day in its genesis block.
But Luckycoin was never intended to disrupt the corrosive financial system; it was an experiment meant to be “fun, fast, and fair.” Head of partnerships and BD in the Luckycoin community, Dan, explains:
“Fast, because of its quick epochs and speed, fair in the sense that no VCs were backing the coin, similar to Bitcoin. It’s completely decentralized, so it gave everyone the opportunity to buy at whatever price it was.
The fun aspect is that every block mined has an opportunity to earn 2x, 5x, or 58x the normal block rewards. This adds to the unpredictability associated with Lucky, and that’s where that meme aspect comes in.”
Luckycoin introduced the concept of LuckyBlocks, with additional random rewards at a 5%, 1%, and 0.01% probability, respectively. As a coin that’s now merge-mined along with Litecoin, Dogecoin, and other Scrypt coins, miners can simultaneously earn LKY at no extra cost when mining any of these other coins. Dan enthuses:
“We’re merge-mined as part of the Binance merge mining pool, which increases the hash rate of the blockchain, which then shores up the blockchain and makes it more secure.”
As an OG Proof-of-Work coin, Lucky’s a direct descendant of Bitcoin and the chain from which Dogecoin was forked. Dan says:
“So it goes Bitcoin, then forked to Litecoin, which then forked to Lucky. Luckycoin itself was then forked to create Dogecoin, so it’s actually the father of Dogecoin.”
Who’s your daddy?
Those deep in the weeds of Dogecoin’s story may recall hearing about Billy Markus’ quest to create a joke crypto that would capture the imagination of its community.
He spent “a couple of hours” forking Luckycoin, changing its fonts, tokenomics, branding, and turning it into the chain every member of the Department of Government Efficiency has come to know and love.
Early versions of the Dogecoin wallet still contained references to Luckycoin, with a warning left over from the fork in Dogecoin’s client that said, “You will LOSE ALL OF YOUR LUCKYCOINS!” if you forget your passphrase.
Sadly, like many ungrateful offspring before it, Dogecoin’s success came to the detriment of Luckycoin. The Shiba Inu-themed memecoin went viral in 2014, becoming one of the most traded cryptos around and leaving Luckycoin in the dust.
All traces of LuckyC vanished, and there were no new updates onchain. Interest dwindled, and developers, miners, and Lucky enthusiasts dropped off a cliff, sending the chain into a 10-year dormancy.
The last block mined in the original run was block #81,743 on November 25, 2013. Luckycoin became a mere footnote in crypto history.
Luckycoin: gone but not forgotten
Between 2014 and 2024, no new blocks were mined. Luckycoin remained in a comatose state, its fate seemingly sealed among the echelons of failed cryptos, known only to a few as the forebear of Elon’s pet chain.
Yet, just like the ring of power, Luckycoin’s code base lay patiently in wait to be found years later by a new owner.
In August 2024, at the height of the meme coin craze, a group of unsuspecting developers came across an old backup of the Luckycoin blockchain from 2013. Destiny was ready to be rewritten.
Luckycoin was revived by a community takeover team (CTO). Instead of creating a new coin from scratch, the team elected to continue on the original chain, picking up where LuckyC left off and producing block #81,744 on August 25, 2024, to preserve the original genesis block and all historical transactions.
One of the first restorative tweaks the CTO team made was to adjust the Luckycoin code to run on modern systems by adding Auxiliary Proof-of-Work (AuxPoW) support. This enabled merge mining along with Dogecoin, Litecoin, and other Scrypt coins. Dan says:
“With merge mining, as long as Litecoin and Dogecoin are going to be around, then we’ll be around because I don’t see either of those two going out of business any time soon.”
Scarcer than a snowball in the Sahara
One of the most appealing aspects of Luckycoin is the scarcity of its supply: of the 20 million or so coins that will ever be mined, at least 15% have been lost forever, with a further 11% permanently out of circulation. Dan explains:
“It is one of the most scarce coins out there. Roughly 20 million lucky coins will be created. We say roughly because of that unpredictability with the LKY mining, the 2x, 5x, and 58x I mentioned, so you can’t ever get 20 million coins created. You probably get 20,000,100.”
Of the capped supply, more than 3.1 million LKY lie in dormant wallets, likely lost, and over 2.2 million are blacklisted and unable to be used. Dan clarifies:
“There’s a whole bunch of large coin holders that can never access them because they were sitting on exchanges that went out of business and went bust. Back in the day, you couldn’t store your coins on a Ledger or a Trezor, and they were pretty much sitting on exchanges that went down the drain. We have the list of the dormant cold wallets that have been untouched, and we’re tracking them. None of them has actually popped up.”
LKY to the moon… and back
By late 2024, major mining pools like Binance and ViaBTC were merge-mining LKY, boosting the network’s security and power, and sending the hash rate from ~5 TH/s to over 50 TH/s within a week of the revival. The new team also implemented a faster halving schedule (every 100k blocks) to accelerate the distribution of the remaining supply.
With the wind at its back, the sky was the limit for the plucky little chain that could. Lucky blocks, a scarce supply, and merge-mined along with one of the industry’s most popular memecoins, a frenzy for LKY ensued.
It wasn’t only nostalgic miners and developers who returned. Luckycoin appealed to the next generation of crypto adopters who bought into its wild price action and historic lore. Luckycoin was a rare gem in a sea of pump.fun shills.
Drunk on its captivating story, LKY supporters continued to emerge and listings on exchanges like MEXC and Gate followed. Crypto influencers and KOLs like TheCryptoDog and Miles Deutscher began jumping on the bandwagon as well, dedicating a YouTube video to his Luckycoin thesis, wide-eyed, with the opening words:
“Oh boy, I think I’ve just found something absolutely huge.”
The boatload of momentum surrounding Lucky sent its price ripping into the stratosphere, from ~30 cents a coin all the way to an eyewatering all-time high of $16.83 on November 25, 2024.
It was all yacht parties, dancing girls, and champagne… until Lucky’s past came back to haunt it, and the price came crashing down like a piano from a tenth-floor window.
What goes up must come down
Over the 2024 Christmas and New Year’s holiday period, Luckycoin suffered a Replay Attack, and a vulnerability in its code was exploited by an unscrupulous villain, who was able to replay old transactions from the legacy chain and drain dormant wallets.
2,679,390.79 LKY were moved during the attack, involving 1,307 distinct input addresses (previously dormant) and 580 distinct output addresses, not just taking the wind out of Luckycoin’s sails, but stirring an almighty hurricane blasting it all the way back from whence it came. LKY lost ~95% of its value within a couple of weeks. Dan remarks:
“There was an old chain that was running concurrently, and they recalled a whole bunch of LKY to set a whole cascade of sell orders, so there was a flooding of LKY onto the market.”
The addresses in the replay attack were blacklisted, and the core vulnerability was fully patched at the cryptographic level, making legacy transactions invalid on the new chain, with “zero percent chance of it happening again.” Yet, the fallout was severe: LKY today trades at under 30 cents a coin.
While Lucky’s second demise was not malevolently executed in the pump-and-dump fashion of your average memecoin scam, a cursory glance at that price chart does little to instill faith in your average buyer. Dan laments:
“There was a massive price retrace, with people thinking that it was a scam, which it wasn’t because it’s completely decentralized.”
Third time’s a charm for Luckycoin?
Dan speaks about the strength of the community and how its CTO team members (the ones who didn’t flee) rallied around the OG memecoin and set about making amends.
“We’re a group of members that have come together who see the same vision in terms of restoring Lucky to its glory. Some of the old CTOs stepped down because of reputational damage, and a new CTO came on board.
It happened organically, and it happened during the mess of the replay attack. Out of that was a phoenix rising, where we all came together, with the same vision and mission.”
Since its painful retracement, the new CTO has worked tirelessly to bring Lucky back to life for a third time, patching the code, restoring trust, and building key partnerships and community.
Luckycoin recently joined forces with one of the longest-standing crypto wallets in the industry, Coinomi, enabling LKY holders to store their coins safely, non-custodially, and offchain. Dan regails:
“Coinomi was running a competition where they would partner with the largest engaging community, so that just goes to show you the community we have.”
Beyond its partnerships with MEXC and Gate, an initiative with Scrypt Wallet to bridge LKY to the Solana ecosystem is now in its final stages. Dan enthuses:
“A Lucky to Solana bridge will be great because it opens up LKY to all of the Solana people.”
The team is also looking to implement a hard wallet integration and is in the early stages of partnerships with Trezor, with plans to extend support to Ledger.
They are also busily working on a “marketing push” to raise the LKY price to a dollar and produce enough volume to be listed by a larger exchange, such as Binance or OKX. Dan shares:
“We need to grow the community first and use the current exchanges that we have to go to the bigger players.”
Will the coin’s scarcity, Bitcoin lineage, Lucky Blocks, and great lore be enough to see Luckycoin shine for a third time? Dan certainly thinks so:
“It’s a long-term cycle coin, and it has such a unique place in crypto history that we’re trying to maintain.”
ICYMI: You can catch the AMA recording with Coinomi and the Luckycoin CTO here, in which they cover Luckycoin’s past, present, and future. You can find additional updates on Luckycoin on X.
