Litecoin

Pre-Litecoin

By 2011, bitcoin mining was largely performed by GPUs.^[7] This raised concern in some users that mining now had a high barrier to entry, and that CPU resources were becoming obsolete and worthless for mining. Using code from bitcoin, a new alternative currency was created called Tenebrix (TBX). Tenebrix replaced the SHA-256 rounds in bitcoin's mining algorithm with the scrypt function,^[8] which had been specifically designed in 2009 to be expensive to accelerate with FPGA or ASIC chips.^[9] This would allow Tenebrix to have been "GPU-resistant", and utilize the available CPU resources from bitcoin miners. 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).^[8] However, the developers included a clause in the code that would allow them to claim 7.7 million TBX for themselves at no cost, which was criticized by users.^[10]

To address this, Charlie Lee, a Google employee who would later become engineering director at Coinbase,^[11] created an alternative version of Tenebrix called Fairbrix (FBX).^[3] Litecoin inherits the scrypt mining algorithm from Fairbrix, but returns to the limited money supply of bitcoin, with other changes.

Creation and launch

Lee released Litecoin via an open-source client on GitHub on October 7, 2011.^[12] The Litecoin network went live on October 13, 2011.

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.^{[citation needed]}

2011–2016

After launch, the early growth of Litecoin was aided by its increasing exchange availability and liquidity on early exchanges such as BTC-e. During the month of November 2013, the aggregate value of Litecoin experienced massive growth which included a 100% leap within 24 hours.^[13][14]

In early 2014, Lee suggested merge mining (auxPOW) Dogecoin with Litecoin to the Dogecoin community at large. In September 2014, Dogecoin began merge-mining with Litecoin.^[15]

2017–2021

In 2020, PayPal added the ability for users to purchase a derivative of Litecoin along with bitcoin, Ethereum, and Bitcoin Cash which could not be withdrawn or spent as part of its Crypto feature.^[16][17]

In September 2021, a fake press release was published on GlobeNewswire announcing a partnership between Litecoin and Walmart. This caused the price of Litecoin to increase by around 30%, before the press release was revealed as a hoax.^[18]

2022–present

In May 2022, MWEB (Mimblewimble Extension Blocks) upgrade was activated on the Litecoin network as a soft fork. This upgrade provides users with the option of sending confidential Litecoin transactions, in which the amount being sent is only known between the sender and receiver.^{[19][non-primary source needed]}