Litecoin

Until 2011, Bitcoin mining was mostly done by GPUs. This has raised concerns among some users that mining now has a high barrier to entry, and that CPU resources are becoming obsolete and worthless for mining. Using code from Bitcoin, a new alternative currency called Tenebrix (TBX) was created. Tenebrix replaced the SHA-256 rounds in the Bitcoin mining algorithm with a scrypt function, which was specifically designed in 2009 to be expensive to accelerate with FPGAs or ASIC chips. This would allow Tenebrix to be “GPU resistant” and use available CPU resources from bitcoin miners. Tenebrix itself was a successor project to an earlier cryptocurrency that replaced the Bitcoin issuance schedule with a permanent reward for blocks (thus creating an unlimited supply of money). However, the developers included a clause in the code that would allow them to claim 7.7 million TBX for themselves. at no cost, which users have criticized. To address this, Charlie Lee, a Google employee who would later become director of engineering at Coinbase, created an alternative version of Tenebrix called Fairbrix (FBX). Litecoin inherits the scrypt mining algorithm from Fairbrix, but returns to a limited supply of Bitcoin money, with other changes.

Lee released Litecoin through an open source client on GitHub on October 7, 2011. The Litecoin network was launched on October 13, 2011.

It was a fork of the source code of the Bitcoin Core client, which differed primarily in reduced block generation time (2.5 minutes), increased maximum number of coins, a different scattering algorithm (scrypt, instead of SHA-256) and a slightly modified GUI.

During the month of November 2013, the total value of Litecoin experienced a huge increase that included a 100% jump within 24 hours. [A better source is needed]

In May 2017, Litecoin became the first of the top 5 (by market capitalization) cryptocurrency to adopt Segregated Witness. Later in May of the same year, the first Lightning Network transaction was completed via Litecoin, transferring 0.00000001 LTC from Zurich to San Francisco in less than one second.

In 2020, PayPal began allowing transactions in Litecoin.

In September 2021, a fake press release was published on GlobeNewswire announcing a partnership between Litecoin and Walmart. This caused the price of Litecoin to increase by about 30%, before the press release was revealed as a scam.