To avoid conflict of interest Charlie Lee, the Litecoin founder has sold all his LTC holdings
Charlie Lee, Founder of popular cryptocurrency Litecoin (LTC) and former Director of Engineering at Coinbase, one of the world’s leading digital currency exchanges, has announced that he is selling off all his Litecoin holdings – except for a few physical “collectible” copies. Charlie founded Litecoin in 2011, as one of the earliest forks of the Bitcoin Core client. Litecoin became immensely popular shortly after its launch, thanks in part to its incredibly low transaction times and the use of the Scrypt Proof-of-Work algorithm.
Litecoin’s growth was also helped immensely by the dynamism and influence of Charlie himself, who has been extremely vocal in pushing for technology upgrades to the cryptocurrency network. Charlie’s opinions and views have a great impact on the Litecoin community and the larger cryptocurrency ecosystem. In 2017, for example, he was able to garner support for an upgrade called SegWit (Segregated Witness). In fact, his influence and reach are the reasons behind Charlie’s decision to sell his Litecoins.
In a Reddit post, Charlie explained that he is selling his Litecoins to avoid conflict of interest arising from his role as the cryptocurrency’s founder. Charlie has more than 380,000 followers on Twitter (@SatoshiLite) and has been accused of affecting the price and valuation of Litecoin through his tweets alone.
“Whenever I tweet about Litecoin price or even just good or bads news [sic], I get accused of doing it for personal benefit. Some people even think I short LTC! So in a sense, it is a conflict of interest for me to hold LTC and tweet about it because I have so much influence. I have always refrained from buying/selling LTC before or after my major tweets, but this is something only I know. And there will always be a doubt on whether any of my actions were to further my own personal wealth above the success of Litecoin and crypto-currency in general.” said Charlie.
Charlie stated he has sold or donated all his Litecoin in the last few days, but will continue to keep working to improve the cryptocurrency in the future. He added, “This is definitely a weird feeling, but also somehow refreshing. Don’t worry. I’m not quitting Litecoin. I will still spend all my time working on Litecoin. When Litecoin succeeds, I will still be rewarded in lots of different ways, just not directly via ownership of coins. I now believe this is the best way for me to continue to oversee Litecoin’s growth.”
There is no word on the amount of Litecoin sold and donated by Charlie, and he has asked people not to question him about the same, adding that “the amount of coins was a small percentage of GDAX’s daily volume and it did not crash the market.”
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