Charlie Lee, the founder of Litecoin (LTC), issued a public apology for the complete and abrupt shutdown of Litepay. The revolutionary payment option was scheduled for release on the 26th of February this year.

However, due to technical issues regarding finding a card service provider to partner with, the release was postponed indefinitely and eventually cancelled. Litecoin (LTC) had shown tremendous promise in the markets as the release date in February approached. It was trading as high as $247 per LTC on February 21st. With no product to keep the volume up in the markets, the price has gradually plummeted to current levels of $122 at the moment of writing this. This is a drastic 50% drop in value.

So what is next for the coin that was a fork of Bitcoin back in 2011?

For starters, the team at the Litecoin Foundation need to go back to the drawing board. This is after Mastercard openly stated that it would only partner with a government backed cryptocurrency and referred to the rest of crypto in the markets as pretty much ‘junk’. The bright side of this statement is that it suggests Mastercard is anticipating the release of a National Digital Currency somewhere on the globe apart from the Venezuelan Petro. Such an event would go further to validate all crypto as legal tender.

In light of such a statement by Mastercard, Litecoin (LTC) should consider partnering with perhaps a Crypto project geared towards solving the same real life problem Litepay was intended to solve. One such project is Crypterium (CRPT) that uses a mobile friendly app to process crytpo payments at point of sale terminals. It does this by converting the crypto in its wallet to regular fiat during the transactions. It does this without the need of physical cards. Therefore, no need to negotiate with Visa or Mastercard.

A second option for the Litecoin team, is to continue with business as usual without the Litepay project. Charlie Lee had in January expressed his vision for SegWit and Lightning Networks on the Litecoin platform. The team has an exciting road-map ahead with the recent release of Litecoin Core 0.16.0 to kick start progress moving forward.