Charlie Lee Sold All His Litecoin

Charlie Lee (the creator of Litecoin) has sold/donated all of his Litecoin. The idea being this will let him focus on Litecoin development and comment on it freely.

According to Lee in a Reddit post:^[1]

“Over the past year, I try to stay away from price related tweets, but it’s hard because price is such an important aspect of Litecoin growth. And whenever I tweet about Litecoin price or even just good or bads news, I get accused of doing it for personal benefit. Some people even think I short LTC! So in a sense, it is 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.

For this reason, in the past days, I have sold and donated all my LTC. Litecoin has been very good for me financially, so I am well off enough that I no longer need to tie my financial success to Litecoin’s success. For the first time in 6+ years, I no longer own a single LTC that’s not stored in a physical Litecoin. (I do have a few of those as collectibles.) 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.

Please don’t ask me how many coins I sold or at what price. I can tell you that the amount of coins was a small percentage of GDAX’s daily volume and it did not crash the market.

UPDATE: I wrote the above before the recent Bcash on GDAX/Coinbase fiasco. As you can see, some people even think I’m pumping Bcash for my personal benefit. It seems like I just can’t win.”

For the record, if you follow Charlie Lee on Twitter, or read his writing, you get these sense that he is a standup guy.

The fact that he would sell of all his Litecoin to focus on developing Litecoin is admirable. It is not exactly altruistic to turn a bunch of Litecoin into a fortune, especially not when Bitcoin Cash (a Litecoin competitor of sorts) is being listed on Coinbase.

However, it is admirable (after-all we all have the right to cash out, but no one is forcing us to continuing developing an open source project in the crypto space).

Further, if you have been in crypto for as long as Charlie has, you likely know to hold and believe Litecoin will rise in value over the years. Thus, if you are optimistic about Litecoin, Charlie left a giant chunk of money on the table.

In short, Charlie isn’t quitting Litecoin, and he isn’t divesting from crypto, he simply sold off the coin he created and works on, litecoin.

Also, to reiterate his point, he did it right before the Bcash drama.

SPECULATION FROM ZEROHEDGE: Zerohedge.com, which is known for its speculative posting and doomsday predictions (which some might see as the spreading of FUD and the pumping of assets via the media), speculated the Facebook might be adopting Litecoin (and thus Charlie had to sell to prevent conflict of interest). Maybe this is true, but I mean, does Zuckerberg not hold Facebook stock? Anyway, this is the sort of thing where you might not even want to buy the rumor. If you invest in Litecoin, I suggest you do it for the coin, and not for a Zerohedge article. That said, I thought it was relevant and important to note this here. It is pure speculation, would be cool if it is true, but I wouldn’t literally bet on it. See: Zerohedge.com’s “Is This Why Charlie Lee Sold His Litecoin?”

1. Litecoin price, tweets, and conflict of interest