Like Bitcoin, LTC is first and foremost a digital currency that can be exchanged peer-to-peer, untrusted and securely, very quickly and at minimal cost.
The modifications made to the Bitcoin blockchain to give rise to Litecoin’s blockchain required only minor efforts in terms of IT development, as most of the innovation came from Bitcoin. Nevertheless, Litecoin’s strength lies in the fact that these changes are few but significant:
A ”proof of work” that uses the Scrypt hash function rather than SHA-256 for Bitcoin
Block creation four times faster, with an average interval of 2.5 minutes instead of 10 minutes
Total number of units four times greater, with 84 million instead of 21 million
Mining difficulty changes every two and a half days instead of every two weeks
On the other hand, as with Bitcoin, the issuance of new litecoins is halved every 4 years (halving): since August 2019, miners have received 12.5 litecoins as a reward for each block validated.