In its most basic form, Litecoin is a decentralized peer-to-peer cryptocurrency and payment network. Using Litecoin, network participants are able to make worldwide payments at relatively low costs and high speeds.
Litecoin was created in 2011 by Charlie Lee (a former employee at Google and Coinbase). Early on in the history of cryptocurrency, concerns over the wait times in block transaction confirmations in Bitcoin were present. Recognizing this, Lee introduced several minor technical modifications into Bitcoin's source code resulting in a network offering high speed transactions at relatively lower cost.
As such, Litecoin was designed to be a 'lighter' more efficient version of Bitcoin, meeting Bitcoin's original goal of becoming digital peer-to-peer 'cash'. Often Litecoin is referred to as the 'silver' to Bitcoin's gold. Clearly, Litecoin has become the earliest and one of the most successful Bitcoin derivatives in the industry, having cemented a spot in the top 50 cryptocurrency's measured by marketcap (currently no. 24 on CoinMarketCap).
In fact, the tokenomics surrounding Litecoin is straightforward and may be summarized as follows. Per CoinMarketCap, at the time of the writing of this article (January 7, 2021 at 10:55 EDT) there is a circulating supply of 69,362,819.51 LTC. With the current price of $130.65 the market capitalization of Litecoin (LTC) is $9,061,937,147. There is a total supply of 84,000,000 coins authorized yielding a fully diluted market capitalization of $10,980,801,494.
Litecoin is a highly liquid asset which may be found on most major exchanges. This liquidity makes Litecoin an attractive choice for traders. As the network transaction costs are relatively low for Litecoin, some even use the coin to transfer funds between lending platforms and/or exchanges to escape the higher fees charged on other networks - for example Bitcoin and Ethereum.
There can be no doubt that Litecoin is in any way as popular as Bitcoin. Nonetheless, Litecoin is highly useable in that it routinely has between 200,000 and 300,000 active network addresses and regularly processes more than 100,000 transactions per day.
As we view the evolution of cryptocurrency, we see Bitcoin becoming a store of value while Litecoin is retaining its transactional nature. This being the case, the current main competitors of Litecoin are Bitcoin Cash and Dash. But it is Litecoin's transactional nature which may suffice so as to insure the future viability of the project given the current parabolic rise in cryptocurrency innovations in the industry. Only time will determine the fate of Litecoin.
For further information concerning Litecoin, please visit the Leo Finance Litecoin Coin Guide.