Flexa Merchants Adopt Litecoin (LTC) as it Outperforms Broader Crypto Market

On July 5, 019, Flexa announced that Litecoin (LTC) payments are now live for merchant acceptance on their app. The blog post details why Flexa chose to adopt LTC and their partnership with the Litecoin Foundation.

At the same time, Litecoin is outperforming the rest of the crypto market, with year-to-date (YTD) gains so far second only to Binance Coin (BNB).

More Adoption, More Volume

As more users move to the world of crypto, the liquidity and volume in the coin’s market also become stronger. LTC already has a significant amount of liquidity as it has managed to solidify itself as a top-five crypto since its inception in 2011.

Distinctive features of Litecoin that made the adoption decision easier for the Flexa team include low fees, fast confirmation times, and an active community passionate about decentralization and payments. These properties make LTC one of the best networks for facilitating micropayments.

Flexa is looking to add a basket of cryptocurrencies to its app to onboard more users who primarily use only one coin. However, their service has seen criticism from staunch maximalists who render this a failed adoption attempt as the end merchants don’t receive crypto.

Flexa deducts cryptocurrency from users’ wallet, converts it to USD, and sends a fiat equivalent to the merchant. In the end, the merchant isn’t agreeing to accept crypto and is using this as a subtle tactic to increase their potential customer base.

The move still represents a legitimate use case, as people who have hoarded value in crypto can spend it without having to convert it to fiat themselves.

LTC Booming

Over the last week, the entire cryptocurrency market has been extremely choppy and seen some significant losses. LTC has fallen in value as well, but the degree of loss does not match that of BTC and ETH.

Since the start of 2019, LTC has returned 305 percent while BTC and BNB delivered 217 and 481 percent respectively. It’s unforeseen that LTC would outperform BTC at the start of a bull market, however in the weeks leading to BTC’s run-up to $19,000 in 2017, LTC performed better on a percentage-gain basis.

The recent interest in LTC comes as a result of the Litecoin halving on August 6, 2019. The market is factoring in the potential supply shock that will occur post halving into the current market price.