What is Litecoin and why is it so popular?

Created by former Google engineer Charlie Lee, Litecoin was one of the first “altcoins”—a name given to cryptocurrencies other than Bitcoin (and sometimes other than Ethereum). “Litecoin is the second-oldest cryptocurrency, forked from the Bitcoin protocol in 2011,” says Jay Blaskey, digital currency specialist at BitIRA.

What is the Litecoin Foundation?

In 2016, Litecoin became the second-biggest cryptocurrency, overtaking all existing altcoins at that time. The project aimed not only to boost the rate of Litecoin’s price growth but also to promote LTC as a trustless peer-to-peer medium of exchange. The Litecoin Foundation has never claimed to compete with Bitcoin directly.

How fast is Litecoin?

Imagine buying something online using a credit card and being on that “your transaction is processing” screen for an entire hour. Litecoin’s transaction processing speed, on the other hand, is 54 per second—and new blocks on the Litecoin blockchain can be created about every 2.5 minutes.

What is the reward for mining Litecoin?

Mining Reward. Miners are currently awarded with 25 new litecoins per block, an amount which gets halved roughly every 4 years (every 840,000 blocks). The Litecoin network is therefore scheduled to produce 84 million litecoins, which is 4 times as many currency units as Bitcoin.