One year after the big crypto boom, founder of Litecoin Charlie Lee is reportedly continuing to focus on increasing the usage of Litecoin. However, some in the crypto community have pointed out that Lee is still benefitting from the pay that he chose to sell all of his LTC holdings at the height of the boom.
When Lee decided to sell off his LTC public, he explained that the reason for divesting had to do with avoiding what referred to as a “conflict of interest.”However, critics within and without the space have alleged that Charlie planned to cash out at the height of the frenzy and make a profit all along.
Incidental Profit
However, Lee told Bloomberg that this kind of criticism is all par for the course, adding that he sold at a time when it was widely believed that Litecoin would continue to increase in value. “People lose money and they want someone to blame," he explained. “And they think for some reason I had inside information, and that’s silly. At the time when I sold, everyone thought it would go to $1,000.”
From what I know LitePay was working on a Visa card but ran some problems, which is not surprising given how hostile Visa is towards crypto. I'm guessing they worked until the last minute to try to overcome this issues but weren't able to. It's unfortunate.
— Charlie Lee [LTC⚡] (@SatoshiLite) February 27, 2018
Perhaps Lee’s gains wouldn’t sting quite so much if the loss of Litecoin’s value wasn’t quite so severe--the value of a single Litecoin has declined roughly 90 percent since the end of 2017. Lee announced the sale of his LTC assets on December 20th of last year, one day before LTC hit its all-time high of $375 a pop. These days, a single LTC is trading for about $30.
However, Lee did tweet that his Litecoins weren’t sold at peak price--instead, they were liquidated in three trades, with each LTC being sold off for around $200.
To those that claim that I sold at the ATH, I actually did not. I sold on 3 separate times: 12/8 @ ~$96, 12/11 @ ~$155, and 12/18 @ ~$350. The average price that I got was $205.
It's nobody's business at what price I sold my LTC at, but I got tired of all the "sold at ATH" hate. — Charlie Lee [LTC⚡] (@SatoshiLite) January 17, 2018
Lee also addressed the criticism in an interview with Finance Magnates earlier this year. “A lot of people think that by not having any coins, I no longer have ‘skin in the game,’ and that because of that, I won’t be incentivized to work on and improve Litecoin,” he said. However, “from my point of view, that’s totally not true because Litecoin is kind of like my baby. I want Litecoin to succeed more than anyone else in the world, even though I don’t own any Litecoins. It’s kind of like my legacy.”
If Lee does indeed want Litecoin to succeed more than anyone, he may have reason for concern besides Litecoin’s falling price. Bloomberg reported that usage of Litecoin has also heavily fallen off since the beginning of the year. According to BitInfoCharts. Litecoin was running nearly 200,000 transactions daily at its height; now, it runs roughly 20,000 daily.
Bloomberg reported that Lee’s plans for moving forward include getting more merchants to adopt the use of Litecoin. However, the massive decline in price in addition to the failure of the Litepay initiative earlier this year may make Litecoin a tough sell.
From what I know LitePay was working on a Visa card but ran some problems, which is not surprising given how hostile Visa is towards crypto. I'm guessing they worked until the last minute to try to overcome this issues but weren't able to. It's unfortunate.
— Charlie Lee [LTC⚡] (@SatoshiLite) February 27, 2018
