Litecoin Foundation’s managing director shares his thoughts on decentralized money

Lite­coin (LTC), known as “the sil­ver to Bitcoin’s gold,” has been around for almost 11 years — which is quite a feat con­sid­er­ing a fair amount of cryp­tocur­ren­cies go bust with­in 12 months of launch­ing. Coin­tele­graph spoke with the Lite­coin Foundation’s man­ag­ing direc­tor, Alan Austin, about why he thinks Litecoin’s core util­i­ty is serv­ing as a reli­able means of payment.

As told by Austin, much of his vision for Lite­coin is drawn from per­son­al experience:

“When I fin­ished grad school, I worked with start­up tech­nol­o­gy com­pa­nies and real estate. And one of the things I did was man­ag­ing accounts for firms like Bank of Amer­i­ca and Fan­nie Mae, and it was sur­pris­ing to see how old their tech­nol­o­gy was and how dif­fi­cult it was to get stuff done.”

After the 2008 finan­cial cri­sis, Austin began los­ing faith in the tra­di­tion­al finan­cial sys­tem. “See­ing how the big banks set dif­fer­ent stan­dards for every­one at their dis­cre­tion when it comes to access to mon­ey, and how now they were the ones get­ting bailed out, it made me real­ly appre­ci­ate what blockchain tech­nol­o­gy was try­ing to do,” he told Cointelegraph.

Austin explained that Lite­coin was cre­at­ed with many fea­tures and attrib­ut­es sim­i­lar to Bit­coin (BTC). “For starters, it’s decen­tral­ized, and there were no pre-mine tokens giv­en to founders, mak­ing it a fair launch. It also has a lim­it­ed sup­ply, is high­ly liq­uid and has very low fees. More­over, the blockchain has been online for 11 years with­out down­time.” Accord­ing to Austin, the Lite­coin devel­op­ment team pri­mar­i­ly focus­es on three efforts: onboard­ing busi­ness part­ner­ships, mer­chants and out­reach for the Lite­coin Card deb­it card.

“When you use sta­ble­coins to pay for goods, in real­i­ty, all you’re doing is using a dig­i­tal ver­sion of fiat mon­ey. Cryp­tocur­ren­cies are volatile, but no mid­dle­men are tak­ing a hefty com­mis­sion or scru­ti­niz­ing your transactions.”

With the launch of Litecoin’s new pri­va­cy lay­er, Austin said that the coin has become more user-friend­ly for those keen on pro­tect­ing their data. “It offers fun­gi­bil­i­ty,” he said. “When you go to pay with a cred­it card or hard cash, the mer­chant doesn’t know how much cash you’ve got in your pock­et, nor your bank account. But, say, if you pay with Bit­coin, every­one can see that trans­ac­tion and your wal­let bal­ance on the blockchain.” Austin explains that the new pri­va­cy lay­er on top of Lite­coin solves the prob­lem. “We are allow­ing users to hide their address and bal­ance amount when mak­ing pay­ments. And it’s real­ly use­ful for pro­tect­ing people’s pri­va­cy, such when receiv­ing their pay­roll in crypto.”

Final­ly, for Austin, the idea of Lite­coin lies in its evo­lu­tion as a new means of pay­ment and not so much in cap­i­tal­iz­ing on the lat­est trends in the indus­try. “Our goal right now is to kind of build slow. We’ve been here for years, and we’ve seen that if you move too fast, the project can implode on itself. So, we’re stick­ing to our goal of devel­op­ing Lite­coin as a bet­ter payment.”