Did you know that Litecoin is one of the longest standing cryptocurrencies in the ecosystem?

To help understand why, we recently spoke with Alan Austin, Managing Director of the Litecoin Foundation on the Blockchain.com Podcast.

In case you missed it, here are four big insights from the conversation.

1. Litecoin is like bitcoin…

“Litecoin is a decentralized peer-to-peer cryptocurrency that enables instant, low cost payments, basically anywhere in the world without a third party… There is no bank in the middle to direct what can and can’t happen with an individual’s money.” Alan explains.

2. …with a few key differences

Alan told us that “Although both Litecoin and Bitcoin hold many of the same values, the main difference between Litecoin and Bitcoin is that Litecoin has four times the supply of Bitcoin, it’s four times as fast as Bitcoin, and because of those things the fees are lower than Bitcoin.”

3. Litecoin adoption is on the rise

“Litecoin is growing significantly. We had a total number around 100 million transactions at the end of 2021. We’re currently at about 123 million total transactions,” shared Alan.

4. Litecoin can protect privacy

Alan described “a new optional feature of added privacy called Mimblewimble Extension Blocks (MWEB)… can be applied to conceal the ‘to’ and ‘from’ addresses as well as the amount of Litecoin being sent.”

He added, “[When] you go to a store and pay with cash or credit card, they don’t know how much is in your bank account, nor should they. So this is a basic level of privacy that’s already applied to traditional finance”