Litecoin (LTC or £) is a crypto-currency and peer-to-peer open source code project released under the MIT / X11 license. The creation and transfer of parts are based on an open source cryptographic protocol and are not managed by any central authority. The piece was inspired by, and in technical details is almost identical to, Bitcoin (BTC).
Litecoin was released via an open-source client on GitHub on October 7, 2011 by Charlie Lee, a Google employee. The Litecoin network was put online on October 13, 2011. It was a fork of the Bitcoin Core client, differing mainly in a reduced block generation time (2.5 minutes), a maximum number of pieces, a different hash algorithm (scrypt, instead of SHA-256), and a slightly modified GUI. During November 2013, the total value of Litecoin experienced massive growth that included a 100% jump in 24 hours. Litecoin reached a market capitalization of $ 1 billion in November 2013. In May 2017, Litecoin became the first of the five major cryptocurrencies to adopt the separate witness. Later in May of the same year, the first transaction of Lightning Network was completed by Litecoin, transferring 0.00000001 LTC from Zurich to San Francisco in less than a second. In February 2018, online distributor Alza.cz began accepting Litecoin as a payment method.