Litecoin Reaches New Heights.

Litecoin was released as an open-source client on GitHub on October 7, 2011, by Charlie Lee, a former Google employee. The Litecoin network went live on October 13, 2011. It was a fork of the Bitcoin Core client, differing primarily by having a decreased block generation time, increased maximum number of coins, different hashing algorithm, and a slightly modified GUI.

During the month of November 2013, the aggregate value of Litecoin experienced massive growth which included a 100% leap within 24 hours. Litecoin reached a $1 billion market capitalization in November 2013. By late 2018, its market capitalization was US$4,600,081,733.

The price of litecoin reached an all-time high of $255.42 in 2017, according to industry website Coinmarketcap.com, which takes the volume weighted average of all prices reported on different exchanges to work out the price.

In May 2017, Litecoin became the first of the top-5 cryptocurrencies to adopt Segregated Witness. Later in May of the same year, the first Lightning Network transaction was completed through Litecoin, transferring 0.00000001 LTC from Zürich to San Francisco in under one second.

Litecoin is different in some ways from Bitcoin.

The Litecoin Network aims to process a block every 2.5 minutes, rather than Bitcoin’s 10 minutes. The developers claim that this allows Litecoin to have faster transaction confirmation.
Litecoin uses scrypt in its proof-of-work algorithm, a sequential memory-hard function requiring asymptotically more memory than an algorithm which is not memory-hard.
Litecoin creator Lee on a number of occasions has said that litecoin can be a key player in payments because of the transaction speed, whereas bitcoin is more a store of value. Litecoin has also benefited due to bitcoin’s slow transaction speed.

Due to Litecoin’s use of the scrypt algorithm, FPGA and ASIC devices made for mining Litecoin are more complicated to create and more expensive to produce than they are for Bitcoin, which uses SHA-256.

Another reason for litecoin’s rise could be down to investors trying to diversify into other cryptocurrencies. On Tuesday, around 40 percent of litecoin was bought using bitcoin, according to data from industry website CryptoCompare.

“As the wealth of those holding bitcoin continues to rise, especially among traders based in Asia, naturally they will be seeking to diversify their portfolio into other crypto-assets,” Thomas Glucksmann, head of marketing at cryptocurrency exchange Gatecoin.

“Litecoin is one of the major alternative cryptocurrencies, or altcoins, that competes with bitcoin on transaction efficiency so naturally, it is a strong choice for diversification. Litecoin has always been one of the most underrated cryptocurrencies given its advantages over bitcoin.”

Circulating supply 54,535,183 LTC (2017)
Supply limit Valuation 84,000,000 LTC
Market cap $12.7 billion USD (2017)

http://altcoinalerts.com/litecoin-reaches-new-heights/