Where did Litecoin come from?

Litecoin was founded under MIT/X11 licenses in October 2011 by MIT graduate and former Google employee, Charlie Lee. His aim was to develop a faster, cheaper, and ‘lighter” version of Bitcoin. Hence the name ‘Litecoin’. It was designed to complement Bitcoin by solving some of its issues like fees and transaction times.

Litecoin was a fork of the Bitcoin Core client. Litecoin was launched after people started using GPUs (graphics cards) to mine Bitcoin. The Litecoin team’s purpose was to create a coin that could be mined from home computers because they were concerned about the implications of more advanced hardware being necessary.

The primary differences are its lower block generation time of 2.5 minutes, the proof-of-work mining algorithm it uses, and the cap on the number of coins that can be created – a maximum of 84 million coins, as opposed to Bitcoin’s 21 million.