Litecoin is a peer-to-peer cryptocurrency that was released by Charlie Lee, a former Google employee, on the 7th October 2011. As a fork of Bitcoin Core, Litecoin featured several improvements upon the original Bitcoin protocol including reduced blocktimes, decreased to 2.5 minutes instead of 10 minutes, increased total supply and a different proof of work algorithm (scrypt vs SHA-256). The Litecoin network is scheduled to produce 84 million currency units with a halving in reward every four years just like bitcoin.

The adoption of a faster blocktime meant that transactions were quicker to settle and be written into the blockchain, whilst the adoption of the memory intensive scrypt algorithm was intended to defeat the ASIC dominance of mining. However, due to the popularity of Litecoin, ASICs have been already developed and deployed that are able to mine the scrypt algorithm.

Often considered to be the silver to Bitcoinu2019s gold status, improvements and upgrades are often rolled out to the Litecoin network before they reach the Bitcoin network (such as the SegWit and Lightning Network upgrades). This practice has also led to some people derisively calling Litecoin the test-network for Bitcoin.