Litepay CEO ceases all operations, setback to Litecoin adoption

In a recent announcement, the Litecoin Foundation announced on their website that Kenneth Asare, CEO of LitePay informed them that he has ceased all the operations and is preparing to sell the company.

LitePay was considered to be a major adoption effort for Litecoin. The vision of LitePay was to be a major hub for merchant adoption. It was touted by NASDAQ as a revolutionary new tool where payments could be accepted in LTC across the globe without the general fears of cryptocurrency volatility through Visa compatible cards.

But the recent news of Visa not supporting them dampened moods at the time.

It has lead to a state where LitePay now might be discontinued and the reason for this to happen as explained in the announcement was that Kenneth was not transparent about the funds and was unable to provide a satisfactory picture of where the money was going and that he refused to go into the exact details of it.

Kenneth’s AMA

Doubts had also emerged about Kenneth Asare & Litepay when he held an Ask Me Anything session on Reddit on 16th March where he clearly seemed to be in dire confusion and the community was skeptical Questions about the lack of transparency, merchants signed so far, employees in LitePay and the concerns regarding the developer documentation on the LitePay website were raised.Some users even called it a scam.

Questions and concerns

So the questions that have to be answered are the following:

What is the real state of affairs at Litepay ?

How could the Litecoin foundation be so incompetent in doing basic due diligence?

How could they have put money into such a venture where the founder himself was so opaque about things at LitePay?

The Litecoin foundation & Charlie Lee would have known about the state of affairs because they had invested money into LitePay. It was a major selling point for them. Why did they continue to promote LitePay to the community inspite of such problems internally there?

On the bright side:

This does not take away the technology of Litecoin and its features and it will still continue to function as before.

In recent developments, Litepal which is the new payment processing service for Litecoin which will make it “easier for merchants to accept LTC” is set to be launched on April 1st.

Charlie Lee also announced that Abra will be running smart contracts on the Litecoin network.

But questions regarding the incompetence of the Litecoin Foundation will have to be answered first. They will have to implement processes that provide transparency to the Litecoin community. Or else, they stand to lose the tag of ‘global decentralized currency’ to better coins out there.

Update:

Charlie Lee’s Tweet:

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. https://t.co/khIjeHnyZ1

— Charlie Lee [LTC⚡] (@SatoshiLite) March 26, 2018

Discuss this news on our Telegram Community. Subscribe to us on Google news and do follow us on Twitter @Blockmanity

Disclaimer: Blockmanity is a news portal and does not provide any financial advice. Blockmanity's role is to inform the cryptocurrency and blockchain community about what's going on in this space. Please do your own due diligence before making any investment. Blockmanity won't be responsible for any loss of funds.