Charlie Lee’s plan is to make Litecoin the cryptocurrency of choice for daily transactions while Bitcoin becomes gold’s replacement. However, things weren’t that easy for the cryptocurrency. Litecoin has become infamous because Charlie Lee decided to sell all of his coins during its peak last year. His reason is to remove the conflict of interest in the cryptocurrency.
But other than Charlie Lee, Franklyn Richards is the one who has been working tirelessly in order to keep Litecoin active. Franklyn Richards is the founding director of Litecoin foundation and the operator of Litecoin.com. He is also the COO of Zulu Republic which is a blockchain company that creates products that are meant for Litecoin.
Franklyn Richards is quite an enigmatic individual. He doesn’t use LinkedIn and he doesn’t also have many interviews. The Litecoin COO gave some of his opinions during the Web Summit at Lisbon regarding mass adoption and other topics related to cryptocurrencies.
He got involved with Charlie Lee via Reddit. He got interested with Charlie Lee because “Bitcoin was too expensive”. During this time, Bitcoin was just breaking past $100.
Centralized Authorities Will Take Over Bitcoin?
He believes that centralized institutions are going to benefit from cryptocurrencies. He even mentioned saying that “they will pass that benefit onto their users. It’s a race, It’s capitalism”. He believes that an institutional race is currently happening.
You have the fact that ICE has partnered with Starbucks and Microsoft and launched Bakkt. Also, many are attempting to bring a Bitcoin ETF in the market. Though the US Securities and Exchange Commission decided to reject recent applications citing the possibility of price manipulation, there’s the Bitcoin ETF application by Solid X and VanEck that is believed to have a strong chance of getting approved soon.
Regulation is Not Needed?
Though he believes that institutions are going to take over cryptocurrencies, he believes that regulation isn’t needed. This is quite a different opinion considering many are looking for regulatory clarity. He mentioned that “You can’t regulate something without controlling it. All it will do is inhibit its growth. If states are very friendly and welcoming to it (which they should be) that would be better, but even if they put a ban on bitcoin people will still use Bitcoin”. He believes that “you can take your country out of Bitcoin, but you can’t take Bitcoin out of your country”.
Bitcoin is Always Number One
As for the future of Bitcoin and Litecoin, he believes that Bitcoin will always have its top spot. He says that “I think Bitcoin will always have its place as number one, at least for the foreseeable future”.
Bitcoin experienced stability over the last months as it floated around $6,200 to $6,500. For a moment, it showed less volatility than tech stocks such as Amazon and Netflix. However, a few days ago, Bitcoin dropped to its lowest value in 2018. The reason behind the drop was due to the Bitcoin Cash hard fork.
As for Litecoin, he thinks that though Litecoin doesn’t have plans of overtaking Bitcoin, it is moving forward. “Litecoin doesn’t use the Bitcoin name. We never say it’s Bitcoin 2.0, a lot of these things that have come out use this kind of hype”. Ripple thinks that XRP is Bitcoin 2.0. But with Litecoin’s strategy, is this a good thing or will they forever be a follower and not a market leader?
