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.

Stellar is a decentralized protocol for sending and receiving money, in any pair of currencies, directly on the internet. Stellar enables users to transfer money on their network directly, without banks, and without fees. It was originally created by Jed McCaleb, the founder of Mt. Gox and co-founder of Ripple.
Stellar has its own native coin called Lumens (XLM). All users must hold a minimum of 20 Lumens in order to ensure their authenticity and to maintain a wider distribution and free flow. Users must spend 0.00001 XLM in order to transfer fiat currencies. This provides the network with more liquidity for less popular currency pairs. Lumens are an inflationary currency with a fixed increase rate of 1% per year.
The network uses the Stellar Lumens Consensus Protocol (SCP). Unlike PoW or PoS consensus mechanisms, SCP relies on a Federated Byzantine Agreement (FBA), in which specific groups of nodes are chosen to arrive at transaction agreement. This provides the Stellar network with more decentralized control.
Lightyear.io, a for-profit entity of Stellar, was launched in 2017 as the commercial arm of the company.