A brief history
Litecoin was launched in 2011 by Charlie Lee, a former Google employee. It aims to be a "lite" version of Bitcoin in that it features many of the same properties as Bitcoin–albeit lighter weight. It's commonly often referred to as "digital silver" to Bitcoin's "digital gold" and is often used as a pseudo testnet for Bitcoin, adopting new protocol changes before they are deployed on Bitcoin. Like Bitcoin, Litecoin uses a form of proof-of-work mining to enable anyone who dedicates their computing resources to add new blocks to its blockchain and earn the new Litecoin it creates. Where Litecoin differs is in its mining algorithm called Scrypt PoW. Scrypt allows the platform to finalize transactions faster. On Litecoin, new blocks are added to the blockchain roughly every 2.5 minutes (as opposed to 10 minutes on Bitcoin).

LTC in practice
Litecoin (LTC) is a cryptocurrency that was designed to provide fast, secure and low-cost payments by leveraging the unique properties of blockchain technology. As of January 2021, Litecoin is one of the most widely accepted cryptocurrencies, and more than 2,000 merchants and stores now accept LTC across the globe. Like Bitcoin, the creation of Litecoin tokens involves a process called mining. For participating in the act of mining, miners are rewarded with Litecoin. Litecoin is programmed to produce only a finite supply (84 million) of its cryptocurrency and to periodically reduce the amount of new LTC it introduces into its economy through a process called halving. Halving refers to an instance of halving the amount of Litecoin rewards that miners are given for each block.