What is Litecoin?
Litecoin (LTC) was created in 2011 by Charlie Lee, a former Google engineer, as a fork of Bitcoin. It was designed to be 'the silver to Bitcoin's gold' - a lighter, faster version of Bitcoin for everyday transactions. Litecoin uses the Scrypt hashing algorithm instead of Bitcoin's SHA-256 and targets a 2.5-minute block time, four times faster than Bitcoin.
Litecoin is one of the oldest and most consistently active cryptocurrencies. Despite more than a decade of newer projects, it remains in the top echelon of market cap and is supported by every major exchange, custodian and payment processor.
How does Litecoin work?
Litecoin uses Proof-of-Work with Scrypt, a memory-hard hashing function originally designed to resist specialised mining hardware. Blocks are produced every 2.5 minutes and the total supply is capped at 84 million LTC - exactly four times Bitcoin's 21 million cap.
Litecoin has often served as a testbed for Bitcoin-compatible upgrades: Segregated Witness (SegWit) activated on Litecoin before Bitcoin, and MimbleWimble Extension Blocks (MWEB) - an opt-in privacy feature - launched on Litecoin in 2022. These proven-in-production deployments influenced how similar features were debated on Bitcoin.