Market cap: $16.5 billion
Year-to-date rise: 6,859.6 percent
Litecoin is probably bitcoin’s closest rival in terms of the use case. Founder Charlie Lee has, on numerous occasions, said the cryptocurrency can be used for payments because it’s faster than bitcoin.
Litecoin transactions take just over two minutes to go through, compared to an average of around nearly 300 minutes for bitcoin.
There is a limited supply of 84 million litecoins, compared to 21 million bitcoin. Currently, 54,293,533 litecoin and 16,740,175 bitcoin are in circulation.
“Litecoin is very similar to bitcoin except it has four times as many coins. It’s also four times faster,” Lee told CNBC in a TV interview earlier this week.
“I think litecoin is targeted more towards payments, faster transactions and lower fees.”
