Fifth-placed cryptocurrency Litecoin saw its value rise by nearly 35 percent in a 24-hour period today ahead of the LitePay launch.
In an announcement on Twitter, the San Francisco-based payment processing company said that it would be launching on the 26th February. As a result, prices earlier today saw Litecoin jump to $218, according to CoinMarketCap. This gave it a LTC/BTC trading price of $0.0235 BTC, higher than what it achieved in July 2015, at 0.0280 BTC.
At the time of publishing, it’s trading at $210, giving it a market value of $11.6 billion, and pushing it into fifth place.
Significantly, Charlie Lee, the creator of Litecoin, took to social media to say:
“LTC/BCH has just surpassed 0.02. This is higher than when I sold my litecoins. In other words, LTC has outperformed BTC since that time. Just saying!”
LitePay, which has a similar website layout to that of bitcoin payment provider BitPay, will be offering many of the same services to that of the Atlanta-based provider. One of its features will be to allow businesses to accept Litecoin payments. It will also issue a LitePay debit card to be used anywhere.
According to LitePay, people were asking BitPay to accept Litecoin, but when they refused LitePay was born taking on the challenge of providing a platform instead.
“I have always thought of Litecoin as a sleeping giant,” said David Motta, Internet entrepreneur, investor, and CEO of business consulting firm, ACQURE Business Solutions, speaking to Ethereum World News. “However, between rumours around Microsoft planning to use it on their decentralised identity system and with the recent developments of the LitePay technology focused on allowing businesses to start accepting Litecoin payments and Litecoin debit cards, this might be the bold move that brings Litecoin into the mainstream.”
Motta added that ‘the chicken is about to rise.’
This, however, is one reason why Litecoin’s price has seen a bump in value. Reports are suggesting that it could also be linked to an announcement that an unaffiliated organisation is going to hard fork the main Litecoin blockchain to create Litecoin Cash on the 19th February.
Notably, however, Lee announced a week before that any fork of litecoin ‘is a scam trying to confuse you it’s related to Litecoin.’
Back in January, Lee said:
“Since on the topic of scams, any fork of Litecoin, calling itself Litecoin something or other, is a scam IMO. Litecoin Cash, Litecoin Plus, Litecoin *… all scams trying to confuse users into thinking they are Litecoin.”
He also said this applies to all bitcoin forks trying to confuse people.
