What do you guy think to the rumor going around that Charlie Lee, sold or donated all of his liquid Litecoin holdings. This prompted a big sell-off in the cryptocurrency markets, putting on pause the bounce off of the previous night’s bottom below $16000 for Bitcoin.
This comes in the wake of Coinbase adding Bitcoin Cash (BCH) to its stable of coins available for purchase, which also sent shockwaves through the markets.
In his post on reddit, Lee explained that he felt his ownership stake was actually a burden on Litecoin’s development as a real-world medium of exchange:
And whenever I tweet about Litecoin price or even just good or bads news, I get accused of doing it for personal benefit. Some people even think I short LTC! So in a sense, it is conflict of interest for me to hold LTC and tweet about it because I have so much influence. I have always refrained from buying/selling LTC before or after my major tweets, but this is something only I know. And there will always be a doubt on whether any of my actions were to further my own personal wealth above the success of Litecoin and crypto-currency in general.
The market reacted negatively to the news but only for a short time. Litecoin under Lee’s direction has been setting itself up as the day-to-day cryptocurrency. One that is easy to use, cheap, fast and easy to pay with.
But, as a commenter on the Zerohedge article on this event pointed out, quite astutely:
It was requested from Facebook to do it so that he can’t be accused of personal interest, decision bias with regards to the LTC ecosystem development. Facebook is preparing the big announcement that they will introduce support for Litecoin as payment channel.
“Digital currency exchange startup Coinbase has announced the appointment of a Facebook executive to its board of directors. In joining the board, David Marcus, vice president of messaging products at Facebook, will bring years of experience in building large-scale mobile products, according to a Coinbase statement posted yesterday.”
And Litecoin, among the major cryptocurrencies, is uniquely positioned to be that currency for Facebook’s digital payment platform as it fills out its road-map into 2018.