BL3P, a Netherlands-based bitcoin exchange, announced that it has decided to phase out Litecoin (LTC), which means the corresponding LTC/EUR trading market will be removed from the platform.
See below the process the company is taking for removal; and their rationales behind adding LTC a few years ago, and now to remove it.
Process
- As of 10 May 2021 (14:00 CEST), BL3P will disable the Litecoin (LTC/EUR) market and deposits – therefore users will no longer be able to trade or send LTC in their BL3P account.
- As of 10 November 2021 (14:00 CEST) BL3P will disable Litecoin (LTC) withdrawals and will convert any LTC remaining in a user’s account to BTC and this will be added to their BL3P bitcoin balance.
Why Litecoin was added to the platform?
The reason BL3P added Litecoin on 24 April 2017 in brief:
- Litecoin was used as a test network with a real value (as opposed to a testnet). The addition of Segregated Witness and experiments with Lightning Network protocol was a good example of this;
- Litecoin was used as a cheap and fast way to make transactions between exchanges. At the end of 2017, the network was very busy which led to high waiting times and transaction costs;
- The activation of Segwit on both Litecoin and Bitcoin made it possible to create atomic cross-chain transactions.
Why Litecoin is being removed?
The reasons mentioned above no longer apply and BL3P wants to focus only on Bitcoin and related concepts:
- Segwit is in effect on Bitcoin and provides efficiency on the network – fee optimizations and faster validation;
- Lightning Network provides fast and cheap transactions and therefore also reduces the pressure on the network;
- Experiments with Atomic swaps have been completed and are not relevant to offer to customers for this reason;
- Litecoin no longer meets BL3P’s core values and from this vision, BL3P does not want to offer this coin to customers anymore and says they do not want to continue supporting this software (node).