Litecoin was released via an open-source Clint on Github on October 7, 2011 by charlie lie, a Googleemployee who later became Engineering Director at Coinbase.The Litecoin network went live on October 13, 2011.
It was a source code 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 (scrypy, instead of SHA-256, and a slightly modified GUI.
During the month of November 2013, the aggregate value of Litecoin experienced massive growth which included a 100% leap within 24 hours.
In May 2017, Litecoin became the first of the top 5 (by market cap) cryptocurrencies to adopt Witness. Later in May of the same year, the first lighting network transaction was completed through Litecoin, transferring 0.00000001 LTC from Zürich to San Francisco in under one second.