Li Qiyuan, the founder of Litecoin. An Asian American, born in 1983, his parents are from Shanghai, and he was born in the United States and grew up in the Ivory Coast. Li Qiyuan graduated from MIT in 1999 with a bachelor's and master's degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.
After graduation, he joined Google, where he focused on YouTube mobile development for six years. Inspired by Bitcoin in 2011, Li Qiyuan decided to create a faster, lighter digital currency as a complement to Bitcoin, aiming to meet the demand for small, high-frequency payments. On October 7 of the same year, he officially launched Litecoin and proposed the concept of 'Bitcoin as gold, Litecoin as silver,' emphasizing Litecoin's role as 'digital silver.'
Litecoin technically optimized Bitcoin's design: the block generation time was shortened to 2.5 minutes (compared to Bitcoin's 10 minutes), it adopted the Scrypt algorithm to improve mining efficiency, and the total issuance was set at 84 million coins. These improvements significantly increased transaction speed and accessibility while reducing transaction costs.
As the chairman and managing director of the Litecoin Foundation, he continues to promote the ecological development of Litecoin. In 2017, he sold all of his personally held Litecoins and donated the proceeds to charity to eliminate potential conflicts of interest and demonstrate long-term confidence in the project.
As the brother of Li Qiyuan, the former CEO of Bitcoin China, Li Qiyuan has a wide influence in the cryptocurrency field.
Unlike Satoshi Nakamoto, the inventor of Bitcoin, Li Qiyuan's identity is public. When asked if being public makes it too easy for those with bad intentions to find him, Li Qiyuan stated that unlike Nakamoto, who owns a million bitcoins, he doesn't have many Litecoins, saying, 'I'm far from a million; each Litecoin I have is either mined by myself or purchased from an exchange.'
