Litecoin

As the second largest cryptocurrency to date, in terms of market capitalization, Litecoin was built as a clone of the original Bitcoin software. Charlie Lee, an ex-Google employee who is now director of engineering at Coinbase, forked the original Bitcoin-QT code and released it as Litecoin in October of 2011 with some additional changes.

Block rate

Bitcoin is designed to deliver a new block approximately every 10 minutes. Some had raised the issue that the confirmation time was too long. Thus, Litecoin was launched with an increased block rate approximately every 2 minutes. This gives Litecoin the slight advantage of reducing the confirmation time, which improves the user's experience.

Litecoin can support higher transaction volumes due to the increased number of blocks. A faster block rate also implies that it's harder to double-spend litecoins. As 5 times more Litecoin blocks are produced for every Bitcoin block, the additional confirmations decrease the chances of double-spend...