Litecoin (LTC) is an early fork of Bitcoin and one of the first altcoins, launched in 2011 by Charlie Lee — an early Bitcoin adopter and Google employee. Litecoin was intended to be a “lighter” version of Bitcoin and is very similar to the pioneer crypto otherwise.

Litecoin is primarily used as a currency, namely a payment method, as it came into existence before the advent of smart contracts and more complicated use cases. It’s a mineable coin, using Proof-of-Work consensus protocol to release the supply into circulation. The most convenient way to describe Litecoin is by comparing and contrasting it with Bitcoin.

• Litecoin has a hard cap of 84 million coins, while Bitcoin is scarcer — only 21 million of those will ever exist;
• Litecoin’s block confirmation times are much shorter — 2.5 minutes as opposed to BTC’s 10 minutes, making it easier to use in everyday transactions;
• Litecoin uses Scrypt cryptographic algorithm in its Proof-of-Work protocol instead of SHA-256, which is utilized by Bitcoin. Scrypt is less suitable for mining with specialized equipment like ASICs, which, in theory, makes it more accessible for the “ordinary” miner. 

Those features make Litecoin nimbler than Bitcoin while keeping pretty much the same level of security and decentralization; note that the rest of the code is mostly unchanged from the original. Overall, Litecoin is one of the most trusted and frequently used cryptocurrencies on the market, ranking in the top-20 by market cap.