Litecoin is a cryptocurrency that was founded in 2011, about two years after Bitcoin, by former Google engineer Charlie Lee. In terms of market capitalization, Litecoin has been in the top ten of the largest cryptocurrencies according to Coinmarketcap.com for many years. At the very beginning of its existence, it was a serious competitor to Bitcoin itself. However, as time passed and so many new projects appeared on the digital currency market, the popularity of Litecoin decreased.
Litecoin is a global open source payment network that is fully decentralized. LTC can be used as a means of payment to settle transactions worldwide without the need for any intermediary to process the transaction.
Like other decentralized cryptocurrencies, LTC is not issued by any state or government that has historically been the only entities that the public trusted to issue money. Litecoins are created through a complex network procedure called "mining" that processes a list of LTC transactions.
Unlike traditional fiat currencies, Litecoin's supply is fixed and cannot be changed. The Litecoin mechanism works in such a way that there will never be more than 84 million LTC in circulation. Every 2.5 minutes, the Litecoin network generates a new block, which is in fact an entry in the book of the last LTC transactions in the world.
The most important feature that distinguishes Litecoin and Bitcoin are the cryptographic algorithms they use. Bitcoin uses the SHA-256 algorithm, while Litecoin is based on a more modern algorithm called scrypt.