Litecoin is a decentralized digital currency that operates off of blockchain technology. The cryptocurrency offers a transparent and immutable monetary system that enables peer to peer transactions, without the need for a government or central authority.
When considering what is Litecoin known for, one of the key aspects to this digital currency is that it offers 4x faster transaction speeds than that of its predecessor, Bitcoin. By increasing the block size on the blockchain, the team was able to speed up the time it takes for transactions to be verified. To illustrate this, in 2017 0.00000001 LTC was transferred from Zürich to San Francisco in under one second.
Instead of Bitcoin’s SHA-256 hashing algorithm, Litecoin built their network to function off of a different hashing algorithm called Scrypt. This offers a lower hash rate and is more memory intensive than the original cryptocurrency. This allows smaller miners to operate on the network, as opposed to only large mining pools.