Litecoin

Litecoin is one of the oldest and most established cryptocurrencies, created by former Google engineer Charlie Lee in 2011 as a lighter, faster version of Bitcoin. It uses a Proof of Work consensus mechanism but processes blocks four times faster than Bitcoin (every 2.5 minutes) and has a maximum supply of 84 million coins — four times Bitcoin's limit. Litecoin uses the Scrypt hashing algorithm, originally designed to be more memory-intensive and resistant to the specialised mining hardware (ASICs) that dominate Bitcoin mining. Like Bitcoin, Litecoin undergoes a halving roughly every four years; it is widely used as a fast and low-fee payment network, especially on cryptocurrency exchanges as a quick settlement rail.