Bitcoin may have caught all the attention last year with its gravity-defying run, but another cryptocurrency was catapulted into view with an even more aggressive price spike.

Litecoin, a digital currency founded two years after Bitcoin, has shot up more than 8,000 per cent in the past year, a faster rise than the price of Bitcoin's which has topped $19,000 from around $1,000 in January.

Litecoin shot to more than $325 on December 11, up from around $4 at the start of the year. However, it has fallen back to about $120 since then.

Growing interest in Bitcoin has boosted other cryptocurrencies, such as Ethereum and Litecoin, as they are caught up in the craze. Some users are thought to be buying into Litecoin simply to diversify away from it, others see it as a potentially more useful alternative to Bitcoin as a practical currency.

What is Litecoin and who founded it?

Litecoin was created in 2011 as a streamlined alternative to Bitcoin. It runs on a decentralised network called the blockchain, but unlike Bitcoin it aims to produce a block of information, which includes encrypted data and details of transactions, every two and a half minutes - four times faster than Bitcoin.

This means it has been around for a lot longer than other Bitcoin alternatives such as Ethereum and Bitcoin Cash.