Lee released Litecoin via an open-source client on GitHub on October 7, 2011.
To improve miner distribution and participation from launch, Lee established a testnet and compiled a downloadable mining binary. After posting Litecoin's defining features and purpose, Lee clarified the launch procedure and polled participants to establish the preferred launch time. With the intention of creating "silver to Bitcoin's gold," Litecoin was developed both by combining the good attributes of previous cryptocurrencies and avoiding their pitfalls as observed by Lee. Noting that earlier altcoins failed due to a lack of fairness, Lee planned Litecoin's launch intentionally to avoid premining and ninja mining. Litecoin inherits the scrypt mining algorithm from Fairbrix, but returns to the limited money supply of Bitcoin, with other changes. To address this, Charlie Lee, a Google employee who would later become engineering director at Coinbase, created an alternative version of Tenebrix called Fairbrix (FBX).
However, the developers included a clause in the code that would allow them to claim 7.7 million TBX for themselves at no cost, which was criticized by users. Tenebrix itself was a successor project to an earlier cryptocurrency which replaced Bitcoin's issuance schedule with a constant block reward (thus creating an unlimited money supply). This would allow Tenebrix to have been "GPU-resistant", and utilize the available CPU resources from bitcoin miners. Tenebrix replaced the SHA-256 rounds in Bitcoin's mining algorithm with the scrypt function, which had been specifically designed in 2009 to be expensive to accelerate with FPGA or ASIC chips. Using code from Bitcoin, a new alternative currency was created called Tenebrix (TBX). This raised concern in some users that mining now had a high barrier to entry, and that CPU resources were becoming obsolete and worthless for mining. By 2011, Bitcoin mining was largely performed by GPUs.