Litecoin was released via an open-source client on GitHub on October 7, 2011 by Charlie Lee, a former Google employee.[4] The Litecoin network went live on October 13, 2011.[5] It was a fork of the Bitcoin Core client, differing primarily by having a decreased block generation time (2.5 minutes), increased maximum number of coins, different hashing algorithm (scrypt, instead of SHA-256), and a slightly modified GUI.[6]