Litecoin Creator Charlie Lee Dumps All Of His LTC After Huge Rally

The founder of litecoin just tapped out of his position amid this year’s 7,500-percent rally.

Apart from a few collectible coins, Charlie Lee sold or donated all of his stake in the fifth-largest cryptocurrency in the world this week as it lingered near $330.

“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,” Lee said in a Reddit post. “For the first time in 6+ years, I no longer own a single LTC.”

He didn't comment on the size or value of his transaction, but said it represented a small portion of daily volume and “did not crash the market.”

A Reasonable Retreat

The sale had little to do with Lee’s faith in the six-year-old coin.

“I’m not quitting Litecoin,” he wrote. “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.”

The disposal is intended to prevent conflict of interest as Lee touts the cryptocurrency on social media, discusses its price and potentially moves the market.

“In a sense, it is conflict of interest for me to hold LTC and tweet about it because I have so much influence,” he wrote. “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.”

Litecoin’s Future

Despite his professed commitment to litecoin, Lee anticipates a “short-term dip due to people losing faith thinking that I’ve lost faith,” he told Bloomberg.

As of publication, though, litecoin traded higher around $344.56, according to coinmarketcap.com.

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Image credit: BTC Keychain, Flickr