Litecoin (or LTC) is a decentralised digital currency just like Bitcoin. It can be used to buy goods and services and for cross-border money transfers. All transactions involving Litecoin are recorded on a secure blockchain (a public digital ledger) called the Litecoin Network.
Just like Bitcoin, Litecoin uses the Proof of Work (PoW) consensus mechanism to validate transactions and for mining new coins. However, Litecoin transactions are much faster than Bitcoin. It’s also easier and less energy intensive to mine Litecoin than Bitcoin because miners do not have to rely on powerful and expensive GPUs. Litecoin achieves this by replacing the processor-intensive mining mechanism used by Bitcoin with a memory-intensive mechanism. In technical terms, Litecoin uses the memory-intensive scrypt function instead of the processor intensive SHA-256 hashing function used by Bitcoin.
This allows Litecoin transactions to be confirmed in only two and a half minutes, four times faster than Bitcoin’s confirmation time of 10 minutes. Litecoin is thus able to process transactions faster and at higher volumes. However, the speed of processing transactions does come at a cost. The scrypt function uses fewer rounds of verification (making it faster), which means security and authenticity are not as high as that of Bitcoin.