Litecoin: A Year in Review

In all honesty, the recent months moving towards the end of 2018 have been very quiet for Litecoin, a cryptocurrency that has seen a huge squeeze in value and that has been pretty stagnated over the year. This, silence, however came off the back of one of cryptocurrencies more controversy rife stories. Litecoin has had it’s troubles through 2018, all of which have been spread across news channels and have been somewhat blown out of proportion.

Litecoin is a buzz word, one that gets people talking. It’s no surprise really, Charlie Lee, the founder of Litecoin is one of cryptocurrencies most outspoken individuals, therefore when the two go hand in hand, a social media storm is often expected.

Charlie Lee is one of the more famous cryptocurrency celebrities, he is most well known for his lairish behaviour online and for being keen to start a debate, or more likely, an argument. This isn’t a bad thing, it’s great to see an individual in the industry with such knowledge and such passion. I think this however brings us to our first point, possibly the biggest and most controversial thing to hit crypto, just 12 months ago.

January

As with every cryptocurrency, January has been referred to as the biggest month for cryptocurrency to date. This is because during this time, we experienced the biggest ever cryptocurrency bull run, the one that took Bitcoin to it’s all time high of $20,000.00 and the one that even managed to take Litecoin up to it’s own all time high of $338.00. Okay, so this price was tipped in December 2017, however through January Litecoin managed to maintain a very healthy value.

What’s controversial about this you might be asking? Well, during the bull run that pushed Litecoin upwards, the creator of Litecoin, Charlie Lee, decided that it would be the best time to sell, and eventually sold all of his Litecoin holdings. This caused a stir, many people saw this as a wise move and asked, would litecoin ever reach that value again? On the flip side though, many saw this as an unwise move, given that Lee is on paper, the person who should have the most belief in the Litecoin project. Since he decided to sell, what message does that give to the community of investors?

Charlie Lee’s decision to sell his Litecoin in December has been noted as the first move in a chain of events that has eventually seen the demise of Litecoin, in terms of value at least. Sadly, though the start of 2018, the bad news continued to roll in.

February

By February, the value of Litecoin sunk to $128.00 alongside the bear trend that had crippled the markets at the time. Many investors by this stage had lost confidence in Litecoin and like Lee, decided to sell up, causing a decline that only seemed to continue throughout the rest of the year. With this in mind, the Litecoin Foundation did admit to a number of exciting projects in the works that promised to have a big impact on the future value of Litecoin.

If you don’t know, the end goal for Litecoin is to become the world's most adopted cryptocurrency. Litecoin aims to offer improvements to the Bitcoin network that make it more scalable and of course, faster, which as we know makes for better real life transactions. Indeed, part of this goal has already been met, with Litecoin seeing a huge uptake in adoption through the year, despite it’s falling value.

Part of this adoption drive was set to be encouraged by the launch of LitePay, a new system announced by the Litecoin Foundation in February. According to their announcement:

“After a month of deep double-digit dives in the crypto markets, we could be on the brink of a launch that sends it soaring again. The Litecoin Foundation is apparently now only days away from releasing a revolutionary new tool called LitePay. This new tool, first announced before Christmas, will allow businesses to accept payment in Litecoin (LTC), as well as with the Litecoin-exclusive debit card, from anywhere in the world instantly and without any of the worry associated with cryptocurrency value volatility.”

March

By March however, the LitePay hype train came to a very sudden and desperate stop, as the whole plan was abandoned. This, left many investors very disappointed, as through the hype generated by LitePay, investors believed that the launch of LitePay would inspire a Litecoin bull run, in the hope that Litecoin would eventually move back up from it’s March low of $115.00.

According to CoinTelegraph, the Director of Operations at the Litecoin Foundation, Keith Yong announced:

“We are currently working hard to tighten our due diligence practices and ensure that this does not happen again. 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.”

Charlie Lee himself took to Twitter to add:

“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.”

And that was that, LitePay was no more. The impact the failure of LitePay had, combined with scepticism surrounding Charlie Lee’s actions paved the way for a pretty disappointing rest of the year.

May - 2019

During May, we did see a slight spike in the value of Litecoin as a result of the mid-April market surge, this in turn encouraged Litecoin to reach a value of $181.00, a two month high that soon sunk back down to $118.00 by the end of the month. From then on, the fall of Litecoin continued, moving down to a yearly low of $23.00 by December 2018.

None of this means the end for Litecoin, what it does mean though is that the Litecoin Foundation and Charlie Lee have their work cut out for 2019 to ensure that they are able to rebuild the trust of their investors, in order to encourage some more investment into the Litecoin platform. Litecoin is a promising project, it’s a veteran across the markets and it’s one that really does have the opportunity to see some true, real world adoption in the future. It’s game on for Litecoin this year, watch this space!

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