Litecoin was created as a fork from the Bitcoin blockchain in 2011, and remains among the top altcoins. The altcoin has had its fair share of highs and lows too, but has continued to thrive regardless, and has been eyed as being relevant in South Korea to facilitate transactions and remittances.
In a recent development, an announcement was made by the Litecoin Foundation about its going into a partnership MeconCash to facilitate remittances and withdrawals of Litecoin in South Korea, from more than 13,000 ATMs. It may interest you to know that MeconCash has a payment’s platform called M.Pay that is used for cross-border transactions, and thus make it easier for Litecoin to get integrated into the payment system.
Litecoin Payments
With the partnership, merchants can accept Litecoin as payment on MeconMall, a retail platform owned by MeconCash, and the users would also be able to make payments for games that allow M.Pay incentives. Explaining the partnership further, users will be able to make Korean Won remittances and withdrawals. According to a survey by CryptoCompare, there was a 24-hour trade that happened between Litecoin and the Korean Won, and that trade was able to produce almost $4.3 million, which was about 0.82% of the total trade that happened at the time of survey.
South Korea Payments
Litecoin Foundation’s managing director, Charlie Lee said the partnership is a grand move at bringing about an expansion of Litecoin’s reach in South Korea. You may recall that back in 2018, about $6.25 billion transfers in remittances got into South Korea, and that was a record volume. Interestingly, several other cryptocurrencies are looking to be a part of the remittance market in Asia, and the partnerships will be beneficial to Asian countries, and the move to make cryptocurrency a mainstream mode of transaction.
Ripple is one of the cryptocurrencies that got into different partnerships in Asia in February, and in a more recent development, there was an announcement by Ripple on the 25th February, 2020, that two companies that facilitate cross border remittance transactions in South Korea, Sentbe and Hanpass are the companies that have joined Ripple’s RippleNet. However, it did not end there, because on 26th February, 2020, Ripple announced that it had gone into a partnership with Azimo, a European provider of money transfer services. With the distributed ledger technology, Ripple will be able to perform remittances to the country of Philippines.
While some countries are still treating cryptocurrency like a plague, the future is looking bright for the mainstream adoption of cryptocurrency in some other countries. We are well aware of the fact that some Asian countries imposed strict regulations on the use of cryptocurrency, but over time, have had a rethink about cryptocurrency, and thus are beginning to see that cryptocurrencies have features that make them good for international trade and remittances.
The move by Litecoin and MeconCash to make remittances into South Korea a seamless one looks like a welcome development that will pave the way for more crypto-based startups to spring up, offering different services.
