Litecoin is a peer-to-peer digital payments protocol that allows participants to digitally transfer units of litecoin without a trusted intermediary. It was an early fork of Bitcoin, differing primarily by reducing average block time target – from 10 minutes to 2.5 minutes – and increasing total supply – to 84 million from 21 million. Notably, Litecoin employs a different hashing algorithm, Scrypt, in an attempt to encourage GPU mining participation. Dubbed the “silver to bitcoin’s gold,” Litecoin reduced block times to increase transaction confirmations and act as a payments layer so that Bitcoin could pivot towards a store of value.