After roughly a month of being in business, merchant processing platform LitePay from the Litecoin Foundation has abruptly ceased operations, having officially begun on 1 February 2018.
Internal disputes
With just over a month of operations and little to zero functional integration, the announcement still came as quite of a surprise; Keith Yong, director of operations, wrote a statement on the Litecoin Foundation blog:
“We wanted to inform you that a couple of days ago, the Litecoin Foundation was contacted by Kenneth Asare, CEO of LitePay, informing us that he has ceased all operations and is preparing to sell the company.”
He continued:
“Prior to that, the foundation had approached Kenneth regarding his less than transparent nature with the company…”
Yong went on to explain that Kenneth Asare had been unable to give the Litecoin Foundation any proof of where the money was being spent and added that there were further complications.
Regret over hype
LitePay planned to offer LitePay Debit Cards which would have been capable of automatically exchanging Litecoin (LTC) into any fiat currency in the world, a simple tool enabling global transactions at the tap of a button. It had also been developed to enable LTC payments for retail, billing, donations and e-commerce.
The announcements of the coming LitePay release provided LTC with a few price boosts on the market, and naturally, the price has been in decline since the bad news.
Despite the setback, the Litecoin team remains optimistic. Yong further wrote in the announcement:
“Litecoin was doing perfectly fine before the promise of LitePay and will continue to do so. The ecosystem is far bigger than one company and is continually growing with support from many others with market-ready products joining the space and fulfilling their promises to make it easier for the world to use Litecoin.”
Litecoin creator Charlie Lee also chimed in on the matter, apologizing over Twitter for creating too much hype:
“Like everyone else, we got too excited about something that was too good to be true and we optimistically overlooked many of the warning signs. I am sorry for having hyped up this company and vow to do better due diligence in the future.”
But for now, at least, cryptocurrency and Litecoin fans may have to wait a while longer before an LTC payment solution is in place. It’s not to say that LitePay is entirely off the cards as Asare could decide to sell the project to a capable company with a strong development team.
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