Summary

Created in 2011 by Charlie Lee and currently being led by the Litecoin Foundation, Litecoin (LTC) is a fully decentralized open source peer-to-peer payment network. Litecoin is able to confirm transactions in less time (2.5 minutes) as well as provide improved and efficient storage as opposed to the original cryptocurrency “Bitcoin” (BTC). Rather than other cryptocurrencies like Ripple (XRP) and IOTA (IOT) which were created to succeed/rival BTC, Litecoin’s design was intended as a compliment to the already thriving Bitcoin.

Distribution

Like Bitcoin, LTC is set to a mathematically controlled supply schedule. The maximum LTC to be mined is 84 million units. Currently, there is a circulating supply of roughly 57 million LTC. The remaining LTC (~27 million) is being mined by miners across the world. A total of 65 addresses currently own approximately 40% of the total LTC supply (23 million LTC)

Company Foundation

Mission

Charlie Lee’s main goal was to design a transaction-friendly cryptocurrency with features like; faster transaction confirmation times, improved community mining pools, close to zero transaction fees, efficient storage. Years later after the completion of Litecoin, the Litecoin Foundation aims to develop and advocate advanced blockchain technologies for the good of its users.

Team

With its headquarters in Singapore, the Litecoin Foundation is vastly supported by a large team of volunteers across the globe. The foundation is still being run by its original founder, Charlie Lee, along with Xinxi Wang, Franklyn Richards, and Zing Yang. Combined, this board of directors has years of both business and blockchain development experience.

The Litecoin Foundation finances and works closely with the Litecoin Core development team which includes the developers of the Litecoin Project.

Technical Design

Algorithm

Litecoin Utilizes the Scrypt in its proof-of-work algorithm. Scrypt is an alternative to the SHA-256 which is utilized into Bitcoin’s Algorithm. Like SHA-256, Scrypt requires a miner to solve a hash function to add to the blockchain. Any and all numbers generated are reserved in the Random Access Memory of the processor.

A main reason the Scrypt hash function was used to design Litecoin was to avoid the use of ASIC miners, which are able to bring about more hashes per second compared to the CPU and GPU miners. This would avoid any disadvantages between the CPU and GPU miners.

Litecoin was the first cryptocurrency to introduce Scrypt. Some coins that currently use this algorithm are Verge (XVG), DogeCoin (DOGE), PotCoin (POT) and a few others.

Mining

Transaction records are kept through the process of mining. This is where computer processing power is used to verify transactions, done by miners. They perform custodial management of the blockchain network, and group new transactions into blocks, verified by other nodes in the network and cryptographically hashed using the Scrypt algorithm of the previous block. The

proof-of-work forces all miners to find a number called a nonce, and when a target block is hashed along with the nonce, the result is numerically smaller than the networks difficulty target. The average time for verifying new blocks is 2.5 minutes.

Key Features

• LTC’s capacity to handle significantly higher transaction volume than Bitcoin which gives it the ability to process more transactions without any future modification to the software.
• Encrypted wallets allowing the user to view any account details but requiring a password to be able to spend any LTC. Providing extra protection from any wallet-stealing viruses.
• Miners are rewarder with 25 new LTCs per block. After every 840,000 blocks (roughly 4 years), the reward will be halved until there are no longer any mineable Litecoin.
• The software is released in a transparent process that allows for independent verification of binaries and their corresponding source code.