Emily Clarke

What is Litecoin in Crypto?

Litecoin is a unique cryptocurrency that aims to serve as a medium for daily transactions. It launched over a decade ago as a response to the burgeoning Bitcoin mining seed. Eventually, it became a compelling alternative to one of the world's most popular cryptocurrencies.

Are you using a Litecoin price feed API and interested in investing in Litecoin? Here's what you need to know about this crypto asset.

The History of Litecoin

The creator of Litecoin is Charlie Lee, a former Google engineer. He released Litecoin to the public in 2011. It gets its name from Lee's vision of the currency. He viewed it as a "lite" version of Bitcoin, calling it silver to Bitcoin's gold.

Originally, the mission of Litecoin was to combat large-scale Bitcoin mining operations. At that point in crypto's history, enterprise-level miners were on the cusp of gaining control of the entire Bitcoin mining process. Lee believed Bitcoin was becoming too centrally controlled, so he created Litecoin to make things more difficult for big miners by using a different encryption method.

That goal ultimately failed because mining operations adapted and continued to grow. But if you use a Litecoin price feed API, you can see that the initial failure was not the end of this cryptocurrency.

Litecoin transformed into a new minable coin. It was also reworked to become a peer-to-peer payment system.

Benefits of Litecoin

There are many advantages to owning Litecoin. This currency is similar to Bitcoin in many ways. However, it uses an entirely different algorithm. Litecoin uses a modified version of Scrypt to produce coins.

It also has a total supply of 84 million coins. The blockchain produces a new block every 2.5 minutes, and Litecoin's supply will reduce over time to preserve its value.

As a whole, Litecoin has a considerably faster processing time than Bitcoin and other alternatives. For perspective, Bitcoin confirms transactions in roughly 10 minutes, while it takes Litecoin only 2.5. While the quicker processing time results in less security, it's a convenient option for smaller merchants performing simple transactions.

Author Resource:-

Emily Clarke writes about global equities markets, commodities prices, forex rates and more. You can find her thoughts at data trends blog.