As everyone knows in the crypto field, “Litecoin is the 'silver' to Bitcoin's 'Gold'”, yet such a saying is not groundless. As one of the earliest cryptos in the trading market, Litecoin has become a regular part of portfolios for major investment institutions. Grayscale, for example, included LTC in its asset holding list long ago, and its current LTC holdings amount to $159 million. Thanks to some improvements to its underlying blockchain technology that address the limitations of Bitcoin, Litecoin has become a hit and a more convenient payment choice in small transactions in daily life.
Compared with Bitcoin, which needs 10 minutes to generate a block, Litecoin only needs 2.5 minutes. Therefore, with faster transaction confirmation and extremely low transaction fees, Litecoin has become a good payment choice for places with small transactions. That is exactly consistent with founder Charlie Lee’s original intention of making Litecoin a “lite” version of Bitcoin
And the Litecoin network is expected to produce 84 million Litecoins, four times the amount of coins issued by the Bitcoin network. The difference between the two is that the Litecoin workload proof mechanism applies the scrypt encryption algorithm, while Bitcoin uses the sha256 algorithm. The scrypt algorithm takes longer to calculate and requires more memory. This algorithm prevents 51% attacks by making it hard for hashrates to concentrate and dispersing miners. Because the scrypt algorithm of Litecoin is different from that of Bitcoin, Bitcoin mining machines cannot be used to mine Litecoin, which protects Litecoin from attack for normal development.
As of March 2022, 69.85 million LTC have been mined out of the total number of 84 million. The Litecoin Foundation recently estimated that it will take more than 100 years for LTC to be fully diluted (around 2140). Because as part of the scheme to reduce the block reward by half, the number of LTC mined in each block will be cut every four years - currently, miners can get 12.5 LTC for every block generated.
The total market value of Litecoin is now as high as $7.3 billion (ranked 21th on CoinMaeketCap). The whole network hashrate is 417.33TH/s (as of March 15 2022). But Litecoin mining is not supported by many mining pools, which does have a lot to do with Litecoin's scrypt algorithm. 
Although Litecoin and Bitcoin cannot share one mining machine due to different algorithms, they have one thing in common: they both have their own dedicated mining machines. Bitcoin has ASIC miners, while Litecoin has Antminer L7, Innosilicon A6+, etc. As can be seen from the ViaBTC Mining Profit Rankings, the daily revenue of the latest Antminer L7 is quite considerable.
To give back to the majority of users for their long-term support for ViaBTC and increase the income of most miners by mining LTC, ViaBTC Pool launched merged mining of LTC and DOGE in 2019, that is, mining LTC to get DOGE as rewards. If you’re interested in the merged mining, you can bookmark this article (https://link.medium.com/6bTrlKUkrob).
Although Litecoin is often ridiculed as the largest "altcoin" of Bitcoin, according to relevant data, currently more than 2,000 merchants or stores around the world have accepted Litecoin for payment, and Litecoin is second only to Bitcoin in terms of global usage, making itself one of the most widely accepted cryptos. As of the writing of this article, the LTC price reaches $103.41.