Litecoin is one of the oldest cryptocurrencies still in use, built as a faster, cheaper companion to Bitcoin. It runs on its own decentralized network that records every transaction on a public ledger, the blockchain, with no bank or company in the middle. It is often described as silver to Bitcoin's gold.
Charlie Lee, a former Google engineer, released Litecoin as open-source software on GitHub on October 7, 2011. He started from the Bitcoin codebase and changed a few key things rather than building from scratch. The result is a coin that works much like Bitcoin but settles transactions sooner and aims for lower fees.
The biggest technical change is the way blocks are confirmed. Litecoin uses proof of work, the same broad approach as Bitcoin, where computers compete to validate transactions and add new blocks. But it relies on a different hashing function called scrypt rather than Bitcoin's SHA-256. Litecoin also produces a new block roughly every 2.5 minutes, compared with about 10 minutes on Bitcoin, so payments tend to confirm faster.
The supply is fixed. No more than 84 million LTC will ever exist, four times Bitcoin's 21 million cap. That number is written into the protocol and cannot be changed at will, which gives Litecoin the same kind of hard supply ceiling that Bitcoin holders point to.
In practice, Litecoin is used mostly for moving value: sending coins from one wallet to another, paying for goods where it is accepted, and as a quick way to settle between exchanges or wallets. Because it shares so much of Bitcoin's design, it has often served as a testing ground for changes that were later considered for Bitcoin itself. Developers have tried new features on Litecoin first.
Litecoin's role has stayed fairly consistent over its history. It does not try to run complex applications or smart contracts the way some newer networks do. Instead it sticks close to the original idea of digital cash that anyone can send peer to peer, leaning on speed and low cost as its main selling points. For people who already understand Bitcoin, Litecoin is easy to grasp because the two are so closely related in structure and purpose.
That close relationship is also why it sits near the start of crypto history. Launched within a couple of years of Bitcoin, it helped show that the underlying technology could be copied and tweaked into a separate network, an idea that shaped the thousands of coins that followed.