Litecoin has gained a lot of attention over the past year, and for good reason. The coin was created by former Google employee Charlie Lee in 2013 and was forked from the Bitcoin Core client. Lee is still at the helm and the Litecoin Foundation now features 6 full-time core developers and a large and growing community. LTC offers some prime advantages over BTC, and there is certainly much space for both of the coins in the future of the crypto world. Here are three key benefits of Litecoin:

Faster transaction confirmation time (4x faster than BTC)
Increased storage efficiency due to scrypt usage in LTC proof-of-work algorithm
More coins to reward miners (84mn to be distributed total compared to 21mn BTC).

These factors make Litecoin an appealing transactional cryptocurrency, and hundreds of e-commerce stores have already adopted accepting payments in the form of LTC, including Overstock.com! Litecoin's website even lays out methods and instructions for merchants to easily implement LTC payment acceptance on their websites.

In the last month, 30% of total LTC purchased was in USD - with 50% of the total buys coming from Coinbase. This seems to be a good indicator that more people are discovering Litecoin, and it’s many benefits. After the coin has been beaten up in the bear market over the past few months, it is up 14% on the week and currently trades at $131.91 on popular cryptocurrency exchanges including Coinbase, Bittrex, and Binance.