Two Litecoin Payment Services - LitePay and LitePal - Coming Ahead This Year
Last year amidst the bull run in the crypto markets, Litecoin emerged as a dark horse by surging past $300 and hitting an all-time high of $346 on December 19, 2017. Litecoin founder Charlie Lee has been quite vocal and optimistic about the future of the cryptocurrency and believes that in addition to Bitcoin, Litecoin too can emerge as a mainstream payments solution.
The latest news in the industry shows that Charlie has been working on a similar path with big plans ahead this year. The Litecoin founder recently tweeted on his Twitter handle @SatoshiLite is planning for a launch of two new Litecoin payments processing services ahead this year.
One of the services will be called as LitePal. A latest LitePal announcement read: “LitePal is a Litecoin-first payment processor. We envision a cryptocurrency world where Litecoin is utilized by merchants from all over the world; one streamlined, simple, less confusing process. Thank you @SatoshiLite for creating the LTC we all love!”
LitePal payments service will be made available later this year. As per the official website, the fees for the same is expected to be “bone chillingly low”. Moreover, it is also being said that users will be able to use the service with PayPal, Western Union, Bitcoin and Litecoin. However, not much information is available at the moment regarding this service.
On the other hand, the Litecoin community is quite excited and positive on the launch of LitePay. The community has set some of the very optimistic goals for itself to make Litecoin usable for payment at any place where Visa is. this service will convert all payments to/from US Dollar immediately and the deposits will incur “a simply, flat 1% settlement charge” against the 3% that is charged by the credit cards as per the official website.
While explaining the repercussions about this, Palwasha Saaim, a research analyst at Lombardi Financial explained: “It would allow businesses to accept Litecoin without worrying about price volatility. Payments would be processed by LitePay instantaneously and settled directly with their banks. Take note that BitPay is currently charging about $5.00 transaction fees for processing Bitcoin transactions that take ages to confirm. The best part is that Litecoin users will be able to convert Litecoins to dollars and vice versa through their Visa-compatible LitePay cards, which will be usable at all ATMs or businesses that support Visa payments.”
Litecoin has gained a lot of popularity in the recent times as it is quite similar to Bitcoin in payment terms and solves many of its shortcomings. In comparison to Bitcoin, Litecoin is much lighter and faster and is able to generate new blocks at four times the speed with a coin limit four times as large.
Litecoin is currently the sixth largest cryptocurrency by market cap. It is currently trading at $140 with just below $8 billion valuations.