Litecoin, one of the first and most well-known altcoins, is celebrating turning seven years old on Oct. 13. Litecoin, a peer-to-peer cryptocurrency released under MIT’s MIT/X11 license, was an early fork of the Bitcoin Core client.

Happy 7th Birthday Litecoin! 🎂 🎉 Help us celebrate today by introducing someone to the power of LTC. And of course, feel free to send a bday gift in the form of a donation to the Litecoin Foundation as we support this Chikun's growth.🐔💪⚡️https://t.co/yRS19nkgYE#HBDLTC pic.twitter.com/fUqwAcjZEa — Litecoin Foundation (@LTCFoundation) October 13, 2018

Ex-Google employee and former Engineering Director at Coinbase, Charlie Lee, released Litecoin via an open source client on Oct. 7, 2011. The Litecoin network officially went live on Oct. 13, 2011. Charlie Lee is the brother of Bobby Lee, former CEO & Founder of BTCC, once the largest Bitcoin exchange in China.

Litecoin first reached a billion-dollar market capitalization in 2013, two years after its inception. Currently boasting the seventh largest market capitalization among the plethora of cryptoassets, there was a long period of time where Litecoin was the second and third highest cryptoasset market capitalization.

How Litecoin and Bitcoin Differ

The primary differences between Litecoin and Bitcoin is a four times faster block generation time, an increased maximum supply, and the use of the “scrypt hashing” algorithm instead of the SHA-256 hashing algorithm. Litecoin aims to process a block every 2.5 minutes, instead of every 10 minutes in the case of Bitcoin.

Litecoin miners are rewarded with 25 new Litecoins per block, which halves every 840,000 blocks or roughly four years. There are currently 56 million LTC in circulation and a maximum cap of 84 million coins.

Litecoin and the Lightning Network

In May 2017, Litecoin adopted the Segregated Witness protocol participating in on the Bitcoin upgrade progress that year. Also in May 2017, Litecoin performed its first Lightning Network transaction from Zürich, Switzerland to San Francisco in less than one second.

The Lightning Network is a second layer protocol that functions on top of a blockchain, supporting Visa-level transactions between participating nodes. The Lightning Network has been highly touted as the solution to scaling blockchains.

Happy Birthday 7th Birthday, Litecoin!

Litecoin $54.82 3.67% Litecoin, currently ranked #7 by market cap, is up 3.67% over the past 24 hours. LTC has a market cap of $3.22B with a 24 hour volume of $436.07M. Litecoin Price Chart LTCUSD Chart by TradingView