02-15-2018: Litecoin Surges, LitePay Set To Launch February 28th

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According to a filing from the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Soros Fund Management secured 2.4 million shares in Overstock by the end of 2017, making it the third-largest shareholder. The online platform became the first major corporation of its type to accept Bitcoin for payments in 2014, a practice it continued before announcing a new trading-focused venture in September. After the unveiling of its partnership involving subsidiary tZero, Argon and RenGen, Overstock enjoyed several months of stocks growth in a phenomenon which repeated as more companies notionally built ties in the Blockchain space (cointelegraph).

Litecoin, the fifth largest cryptocurrency by market cap has surged upwards of 50 percent from Tuesday morning to today, arguably bringing the rest of the market with it. Litecoin’s dramatic price increase has largely been driven by the announcement that LitePay — an instantaneous payment processor allowing vendors to instantly convert Litecoin transactions into fiat currency — will launch on February 28th. The future of LitePay means 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 (bitcoinist).

The head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission said during a Senate hearing today any federal-level approach to cryptocurrency regulation should be “carefully tailored” to the risks involved. The comments by CFTC chairman J. Christopher Giancarlo, issued before the Senate Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry Committee, came days after he and Securities and Exchange Commission chief Jay Clayton testified before the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee on the topic of cryptocurrency oversight. The two notably spoke to what they said were gaps in the state-by-state system for licensing cryptocurrency businesses. Giancarlo told lawmakers that federal regulation around exchanges ought to be carefully tailored (coindesk).

The new coin Litecoin Cash (LCC) is promising Litecoin holders 10 Litecoin Cash for every Litecoin they hold. The forked currency is piggy-backing off the Bitcoin Cash saga. The Litecoin Cash website states that the coin will be governed by Bitcoins SHA256 algorithm instead of Scrypt which verifies Litecoin transactions. The hard fork is scheduled for Sunday Feb. 18, or Litecoin block 1371111. However, Charlie Lee, the creator of Litecoin has released a statement stating “The Litecoin team and I are not forking Litecoin. Any forks that you hear about is a scam trying to confuse you to think it’s related to Litecoin” (cointelegraph).

And lastly, the developers of the Algorand blockchain protocol have raised $4 million in seed funding. The funding support came from venture capital firms Pillar and Union Square Ventures. Algorand constitutes a digital currency and transaction platform, with its underlying protocol co-authored by MIT professor and Turing Award winner Silvio Micali. Algorand represents the latest effort to build a wholly new blockchain system, and is aimed at tackling some of the perceived governance issues associated with distributed systems (coindesk).

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