Litecoin is a crytptocurrency that was created to serve as the “silver” to bitcoin’s "gold." It is based on the core Bitcoin protocol, but was designed with several key features that provide it with advantages over Bitcoin.
Litecoin has significantly reduced transaction times by limiting the target block processing time to 2.5 minutes. It also has a total coin supply that is 4 times larger, and utilizes a different hashing algorithm called Scrypt, that requires a smaller workload and less computation power than Bitcoin's SHA-256 algorithm. This enables much faster transactions at a much lower cost to users. These features make Litecoin easier to use and to mine. Since its creation, Litecoin has gained a large market cap and widespread adoption among cryptocurrency users in need of a coin for everyday transactions.

Ethereum Classic is the original protocol of Ethereum. As a result of the massive hack on the Ethereum-based DAO, in which around 14% of all ETH in circulation were stolen, a hard fork was proposed to return the stolen funds to their owners. This caused an ideological split revolving around the question of changing previous transactions in the blockchain. Some Ethereum holders rejected the hard fork, and decided to keep using the original protocol, based on the principle that the blockchain is immutable, and cannot be changed.