What is Litecoin & How Does it Work?

Litecoin (LTC) is a decentralized cryptocurrency that enables instant payments to anyone in the world and that can be efficiently mined with consumer-grade hardware. Litecoin provides faster transaction confirmations (2.5 minutes on average) and uses a memory hard hashing algorithm called scrypt which prevents mining with ASICs, FPGAs and GPUs.
Litecoin was released via an open-source client on GitHub on October 7, 2011 by Charlie Lee, a former Google employee. The Litecoin network went live on October 13, 2011. It was a fork of the Bitcoin Core client, differing primarily by having a decreased block generation time (2.5 minutes), increased maximum number of coins, different hashing algorithm (scrypt, instead of SHA-256), and a slightly modified GUI.
Litecoin is referred to as "silver to Bitcoin's gold". Litecoin has also served as an experimental testing ground for features that are later adopted into Bitcoin. Examples include SegWit (the Lightning Networks upgrade) which was first implemented on Litecoin in January 2017.