Litepay Reportedly Ceases All Operations
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The highly-anticipated LitePay payment application, which was set to allow users to use Litecoin (LTC) for transactions, has reportedly ceased all operations.
The news follows a highly-critical AMA (Ask Me Anything) session on Reddit, in which Litepay owner Kenneth Asare was repeatedly challenged by inquisitors regarding the size of his team – and to prove their very existence. His responses, which were ambiguous at best, left many with the impression that Litepay was a one-man show with an outsourced compliance department – an impression Asare would not, or could not, dispel.
According to a post on the Litecoin Foundation website, Asare had asked the Foundation for more funds to continue the project but had been “refused any further funding as he was unable to provide a satisfactory picture of where the money had been spent and refused to go into exact details about the company and show objective evidence to back up his statements.”
Some commentators note that the original Litepay privacy policy was copied directly from Coinbase, and the company name was simply replaced.
Asare also faced complaints over the lack of information on the company’s website. Litepay, which had originally been set to launch on the 26th of February, was delayed without warning on launch day, with users being told via email this was because of “hostile action taken by card issuers towards crypto companies”.
As an application, LitePay proposed to allow users to pay for goods and services using Litecoin at a flat 1% settlement fee for each transaction.
The impact for the growth and adoption of Litecoin itself would be minimal, according to their spokesman. In the statement posted on their website, the Litecoin Foundation said: “We are greatly disheartened that this saga has ended in this way and we apologize for not doing enough due diligence that could have uncovered some of these issues earlier.”
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
The Litecoin Foundation’s Keith Yong, in a post on their website, explained that “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”.
The Litepay website described the service as “offering merchant processing, we also provide Multi-signature wallets and a LitePay debit card which allows users to instantly convert LTC into USD.”
Litecoin (LTC) was down over 8% in daily trading, although other top 10 tokens by market cap including Cardano, NEO, and EOS suffered larger drops.
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