What is Litecoin (LTC)?

Litecoin is a cryptocurrency operating on the open-source decentralized network of the same name. It has a limited issuance of 84 million LTC. It is considered one of the first forks of bitcoin due to the use of its redesigned code base. The asset is also one of the earliest altcoins.

Litecoin History

On October 7, 2011, Charlie Lee (a Google employee at the time) posted the Litecoin open source code on GitHub. Two days later, he made a post on the Bitcointalk forum, where he announced his plans to create a new blockchain.

The network was fully launched on October 13, 2011. Charlie Lee believed that there was a need for an alternative to bitcoin, which had serious problems with the speed of transaction processing. For this reason, in his spare time he was engaged in improving its program code, which resulted in the launch of Litecoin. 

From that moment, the cryptocurrency started gaining popularity among users, but in 2013, Lee took a managerial position at Coinbase, so he no longer paid proper attention to his project.

Nevertheless, in 2017, he left his post and founded Litecoin Foundation to fully support the blockchain.

Since the network has significant similarities to bitcoin, they can implement the same improvements. An example was Segregated Witness technology, which Litecoin integrated on May 10, 2017. Earlier than "big brother".

The last significant update is Mimblewimble Extension Blocks, which occurred on May 20, 2022. It allows for confidential transactions where the amount of transfers is only visible to the recipient and sender.

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