Blockchain technology has seen tremendous growth since Bitcoin came onto the scene in 2009; new coins are coming up every other day.
Two of these cryptocurrencies are Litecoin (LTC) and Ripple (XRP). The two have enjoyed relative success over the years and are among the top ten cryptocurrencies in relation to market capitalization.
Litecoin (LTC) is an open source public blockchain cryptocurrency that was launched in 2011. Litecoin uses the Scrypt algorithm which is memory-hard and therefore, unsuitable for ASIC miners. Because it can be mined using CPUs and GPUs, Litecoin is seen as better than the more centralized Bitcoin that utilizes SHA-256 mining algorithm dominated by ASICs.
LTC is a minable coin listed as number 5 on the cryptocurrency market site coinmarketcap.com. The maximum supply for LTC is 84 million, with the Litecoin network block time set at 2.5 minutes. To accommodate the upgrades required, making Litecoin scale, the Litecoin Foundation adopted the Segregated Witness (SegWit) protocol that will enable the platform to implement the Lightning network.
Ripple (XRP) is a distributed open-source payment network that aims to revolutionize financial institutions and payment systems through blockchain technology. Ripple was launched in 2012 and operated in beta version until 3rd February 2018 when its stable version was released. The maximum supply of XRP is set at 100 billion.
The Ripple platform utilizes the Ripple Protocol Consensus algorithm (RPCA), which is applied across all the nodes on the network after every few seconds. These nodes help to maintain network agreement and consensus.
Ripple allows its users to transact in any currency that they hold by either sending it or receiving it on the Ripple platform. Ripple prides itself on being faster than many other coins in the market. It takes only 3.6 seconds to complete a transaction on the Ripple network.