Litecoin is a decentralized currency directly derived from the Bitcoin protocol but with 2 main differences:  a different “proof-of-work” hash function (scrypt instead of SHA-256) and a shorter block interval (2.5 minutes instead of 10 minutes for BTC). Litecoin open-source code was released on Github by former Google employee, Charlie Lee, on October 7, 2011 and went live 6 days later. Litecoin was meant to complement the leading store of value, as an efficient mean of commerce since it can handle 56 on-chain transactions per second (vs 7 on-chain transactions per second for Bitcoin). Litecoin is also using a different hashing algorithm . Moreover, Litecoin was the first Top 5 crypto-currency to adopt SegWit in May 2017 and to perform a Lightning Network transaction (Layer 2 trustless protocol, making transactions nearly instantaneous) the same month.