Developed in 2011 as a fork of the Bitcoin network, Litecoin aimed to improve upon Bitcoin's shortcomings. It was the first altcoin, and its goal was to offer a decentralized peer-to-peer currency with faster transaction processing times and lower fees than Bitcoin. A brief look at LTC price and market cap would indicate that Litecoin was among the top five cryptocurrencies in December 2017. However, since then, the ranking of the altcoin has slipped to the top 20 as more altcoins took up market share and LTC's popularity dimmed. A primary goal of Litecoin was to prevent the centralization of mining seen in Bitcoin. As a result, the LTC token uses a different algorithm called Scrypt, making it difficult for large mining farms to dominate. Scrypt achieves this by making mining more memory-intensive and much slower than Bitcoin's mining algorithm. While LTC failed to prevent mining farms from eventually controlling the majority of mining activity, its focus has shifted to becoming an efficient payment system.