The number of Litecoin (LTC) transactions has rebounded to over 140,000 in recent days after falling close to the 100,000 mark in early October. Three days prior, the Litecoin Foundation tweeted about the launch of its LTC Visa Debit card, powered by fintech firm Unbanked.
According to the card’s homepage, potential customers would first register for a Litecoin Card account, deposit LTC into a specific wallet address, pass a know-your-customer check, and receive a virtual Litecoin Card. The service claims that the sign-up process takes less than five minutes.
The Litecoin card is meant to enable users to spend their LTC at all digital merchants that use Visa as their payment processor — a number the Litecoin Foundation estimates to be around 50 million.
The day after, the Litecoin Foundation issued another tweet about Verifone’s partnership with BitPay. Verifone is one of the world’s biggest point-of-sale payment processors, facilitating close to $440 billion each year in annual transactions. BitPay is a cryptocurrency payment processor handling over 60,000 consumer transactions each month involving Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH), LTC, and more.
Litecoin launched in 2011 with the stated objective of becoming “the silver to Bitcoin’s gold.” Based on data from cryptwerk, there are now 3,111 businesses worldwide that accept LTC directly as payment, up from 2,230 in the same period last year. The digital currency’s merchant acceptance is currently slightly less than half that of Bitcoin’s.