Litecoin is based on Bitcoin open source code but with some technological differences. Litecoin was intended to complement Bitcoin.
Charlie Lee, the founder of Litecoin, wanted to change some rules from the Bitcoin blockchain. He wanted to reduce the amount of time of the transaction confirmations and change the Bitcoin mining algorithm. Litecoin confirmations are 4 times faster tan Bitcoin and i sable to process higher volumen of transactions.
The differences in the mining is that Bitcoin uses a processor intensive mining while Litecoin is more memory intensive. Bitcoin uses ASIC as miners, exclusive machines built for mining, and is less accesible to everyone than a memory intensive miner like Litecoin.
Litecoin added much sooner SegWit than Bitcoin. SegWit is essentially a change to the transaction data format that requires less storage space. Once we implement SegWit we can add additional scaling innovations like Lightning Networks (LN) where transactions can quickly settle off blockchain.
STRENGHTS
Fast transactions.
Creator actively participates in the cryptocurrency community