Litecoin has mostly avoided the sell-off in other top cryptocurrencies in the past week ahead of Monday's launch of LitePay.
What You Need To Know
The price of Litecoin initially spiked as much as 32 percent after the payments-oriented cryptocurrency announced earlier this month that payments processor LitePay would be launching this week.
"LitePay is an alternative to BitPay," Bitcoinist's James Levenson wrote, "which allows merchants and businesses to accept crypto for their services and products."
LitePay will now be available to merchants in 41 countries, including the U.S., U.K. and China.
BitPay, founded in 2011, is the largest bitcoin payment processor in the world, serving merchants on six continents.
Why It’s Important
According to the LitePay website, LitePay allows users to accept Litecoin payments from any connected device anywhere in the world. Vendors can sell to anyone in the world and not worry about borders or security. In addition, users get direct bank deposits in their own home currency for a flat fee of just 1 percent, only about a third of the 3 percent processing fees credit cards can charge.
“Our goal is to create a way for merchants to earn Litecoin, which is a particularly good cryptocurrency for payments,” CEO Kenneth Asare told CNBC earlier this month.
Litecoin has received a lot of attention from investors after partnering with Visa Inc V on a new LitePay Visa card, which can be used anywhere Visa cards are accepted. The LitePay card is like a debit card, but it withdraws Litecoin directly from a user’s Litecoin wallet.
What’s Next
Investors will be watching closely to see how well the LitePay service catches on. With more and more analysts concerned about a cryptocurrency bubble and more competition in the space than ever before, investors need to make sure they are picking the handful of potential long-term cryptocurrency winners.
At time of publication, Litecoin was trading around $221.21, with a market cap of about $12.2 billion according to coinmarketcap.com.
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