Rotate LTC Mining Rewards to BTC
Convert freshly-mined Litecoin directly to native Bitcoin on THORChain. No exchange deposit address in the path, no wrapped LTC, no KYC for miner payouts.
Why miners care about the path
Pools pay LTC. Miners who want BTC exposure usually sell the LTC on an exchange, pay deposit and withdrawal fees, and accept a spread. THORChain replaces the sell-and-withdraw with one LTC send. The BTC lands at a wallet you control — no exchange balance to watch, no withdrawal queue to clear.
- One on-chain transaction per payout — fewer discrete fees, no spread.
- Self-custody end to end — pool pays you, you sign the swap, BTC lands at your address.
- Batch-friendly — works best on batched payouts, where the single swap\'s slippage is a rounding error.
Step-by-step: mining-payout rotation
-
Collect payouts in a self-custodial LTC wallet
Set the mining-pool payout address to a wallet you control. Do not point the pool directly at an exchange or at the THORChain inbound — payouts are scheduled on the pool's cadence, and pointing them elsewhere breaks your ability to see or control the balance.
-
Wait for a batched payout
Most pools batch payouts above a threshold to minimise on-chain fees. Let the balance accumulate to a size where the single LTC → BTC swap has acceptable slippage relative to the THORChain LTC pool.
-
Open the LTC → BTC swap page
Open the cross-chain swap interface on deving.zone. Quote, fees, and slippage display live before you sign anything.
-
Enter your BTC destination address
Pick where the BTC should land — a self-custody BTC wallet, a hardware wallet, or any address you verify on-device. Double-check the first and last four characters.
-
Sign one LTC send with the swap memo
Your LTC wallet sends the full payout (or a portion) to the THORChain inbound address with the OP_RETURN swap memo attached. Broadcast. That is the only signature.
-
Repeat on each payout
Treat the swap as a recurring ops step: one transaction per payout batch. For larger miners, script it via a wallet that supports scripted sends — the memo format is stable.
What about keeping LTC exposure?
Rotating every payout to BTC gives up LTC upside. If you want stablecoin liquidity without selling — e.g. to pay rig operating costs — a better alternative is borrowing stables against LTC on Rujira Money Market and repaying on your own schedule. See the LTC money-market guide for the mechanics.
Mining-rotation questions
Why not point the pool directly at a BTC address?
Mining pools pay out in the coin they mine — LTC from an LTC pool. They do not do cross-chain conversion. The deving.zone THORChain swap is what turns pool LTC into BTC in a single native transaction.
Is it cheaper to just send LTC to a CEX and sell?
Usually not, once you account for all the fees (pool → CEX network fee, deposit risk, CEX spread + taker fee, withdrawal fee in BTC, KYC friction). THORChain collapses that to one LTC send + one BTC outbound miner fee + protocol swap fee. For small amounts the CEX path may match; for meaningful miner payouts, THORChain is typically cleaner.
What if I want to hold the LTC, not convert it?
Then don't swap. Let the pool pay out to your self-custody wallet and cold-store. The LTC hub has separate guides for stablecoin exit and for borrowing stables against LTC without selling.
Can I automate this?
Partially. The swap memo format is deterministic, so a scripted wallet can build and broadcast the LTC send with the right memo. The rate still depends on pool depth at execution time, so scripted swaps should include a quote-check before broadcast.
What about mining fees, taxes, and accounting?
Out of scope here — tax treatment of mining-then-swapping varies by jurisdiction, and some treat the swap as a separate disposal event. Talk to a tax professional. THORChain does not change the accounting picture; it just changes the execution path.
Does this work with merged mining from Scrypt pools?
Yes — as long as the pool pays you LTC to an LTC address you control, the mining setup upstream does not matter for the swap. THORChain sees the LTC transaction on-chain, nothing more.