Litecoin Released
Charlie Lee releases Litecoin, the 'silver to Bitcoin's gold,' which becomes the first successful alternative currency.
On October 13, 2011, Charlie Lee (a Google engineer and brother of BTCC CEO Bobby Lee) released Litecoin (LTC). While not the first altcoin (Namecoin held that title), Litecoin was the first to successfully brand itself as 'silver to Bitcoin's gold.' Lee modified the Bitcoin codebase to produce blocks four times faster (2.5 minutes vs 10 minutes) and quadrupled the total supply cap to 84 million. Crucially, he changed the mining algorithm from SHA-256 to Scrypt.
The switch to Scrypt was a defensive move against the industrialization of mining. In late 2011, Bitcoin mining was being dominated by GPUs and FPGAs; Lee wanted an algorithm that could still be mined on consumer-grade CPUs and was memory-hard, making it resistant to the ASICs that were beginning to threaten Bitcoin's decentralization (though Scrypt ASICs would eventually be developed years later). Litecoin captured the imagination of the community as a 'backup' network and a testing ground for new features. It effectively created the template for the 'clone coin' era.
Litecoin is historically significant as the first 'persistent' altcoin. While hundreds of other 2011 coins died (e.g., GeistGeld, Tonal Bitcoin), Litecoin survived to become a major liquidity bridge and remains a top cryptocurrency over a decade later. It established the multi-chain market structure we see today.
Key Sources: Northcrypto: What is Litecoin | Litecoin.org