Litecoin, like Bitcoin, uses a “proof-of-work” security mechanism – relying on “miners” who expend computational resources to process transactions and secure the network. During that process, miners win rewards – a combination of variable transaction fees and a predetermined “subsidy” that gets halved approximately every four years. (With Litecoin, they happen every 840,000 transaction blocks, and the average time to generate each block is about 2.5 minutes.)