Litecoin (Abbreviation: LTC; sign: Ł) is a decentralized peer-to-peer cryptocurrency and open-source software project released under the MIT/X11 license.

"[7][8][9] In 2022, Litecoin added optional privacy features via soft fork through the MWEB (MimbleWimble extension block) upgrade.

Tenebrix replaced the SHA-256 rounds in Bitcoin's mining algorithm with the scrypt function,[12] which had been specifically designed in 2009 to be expensive to accelerate with FPGA or ASIC chips.

Tenebrix itself was a successor project to an earlier cryptocurrency which replaced Bitcoin's issuance schedule with a constant block reward (thus creating an unlimited money supply).

[14] To address this, Charlie Lee, a Google employee who would later become engineering director at Coinbase,[15] created an alternative version of Tenebrix called Fairbrix (FBX).

Litecoin was a source code fork of the Bitcoin Core client, originally differing by having a decreased block generation time (2.5 minutes), increased maximum number of coins, different hashing algorithm (scrypt, instead of SHA-256), faster difficulty retarget, and a slightly modified GUI.