In 2011, Charles Lee created Litecoin as a fork off bitcoin. In a 2013 interview with CoinDesk, he explained that the creation of Litecoin was intended to bring fairness into the cryptocurrency industry. According to him, the use of ASICs to mine bitcoin had made the process unprofitable for individuals using their personal PCs, even with dedicated graphics cards. To prevent this ‘monopolization’, Litecoin uses a scrypt hashing algorithm while bitcoin uses SHA-256.
This mining algorithm is a ‘memory hard problem’, therefore making it inefficient to do with an ASIC. Today, Litecoin is among the most popular coins worldwide, and can be found on most of the major cryptocurrency exchanges. Support for it is also vast, making it a well-established coin in the industry.