My Thoughts on the Failure of Litepay

Today, the Litecoin Foundation released a statement regarding Litepay.  Kenneth Asare contacted the Litecoin Foundation informing them that he has ceased all operations and is preparing to sell the company.  

Additional Responses From Key Members of the Litecoin Foundation:

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

If you want to build a legitimate Litecoin payment site, please let me know.

— Xinxi Wang [LTC] (@TheRealXinxi) March 26, 2018

My Thoughts 

I am disappointed and sad like many of you are.  I did not expect this and feel like I have let those who follow me down by helping promote this man and his business without doing my due diligence.  I understand why many may be upset as many saw this coming a mile away.  However, you can believe me when I say this is a lesson learned. 

That being said, I believe there are a few take-a-ways from this experience for the Litecoin Community overall:

1. Don't trust, verify- This is more for me than it is for you.

2. Don't hype- Moving forward, we should refrain from overhyping news as a community. Do not expect any news to pump the price of LTC. Do NOT make trades based on speculation. Instead let's work to organically grow the Litecoin ecosystem.

3. Start ups have a high fail rate- Forbes published an article in 2017 stating that the success of venture backed start-ups (measured by if they return 1x or less to their investors) are at around 60%. This is a fairly high percentage. Unfortunately, Litepay is just another statistic and was simply a failure as a startup business. Nothing more, nothing less.

4. The Litecoin network is unaffected- Although there is a lot of disappointment regarding Litepay, their failure does not affect the underlying technology in any shape or form. To be honest, I'd be a lot more concerned if there was a certain bug found in the Litecoin protocol. That actual effect of the Litepay on Litecoin (outside of price) is actually non-existent.

5. Litepay may not be finished yet- As seen above, people like Xinxi may be trying to salvage this situation. Outside of finding other people to take on this business, another idea was to utilize BTCPay (an open-sourced merchant processor) or even Coinut releasing a similar service to something Coinbase has.

6. Fiat sweep solutions already exist- If you were let down because you were looking forward to fiat sweeps, you don't have to worry! There two merchant processors that I know of that already offer this: Gocoin and Aliant Payments. You should definitely check them out! You can also find a list of other Litecoin merchant processors here.

In the grand scheme of things, I see this only being a minor bump in the overall trajectory of Litecoin.  We have gone through much worse like overcoming Mt. Gox (which many thought would be the death of Litecoin) and a multi year bear market.  Remember, what does not kill us makes us stronger.