The creator of the world’s fifth-biggest digital currency Charlie Lee said he has sold all his litecoin tokens over the past few days to avoid further accusations of benefiting via his own tweets.
“Litecoin has been very good for me financially, so I am well off enough that I no longer need to tie my financial success to litecoin’s success. For the first time in six+ years, I no longer own a single LTC,” he said in a Reddit post.
Lee, who started litecoin in 2011, reportedly cashed in during a rally this year which saw his cryptocurrency jump 75 times in value. The software engineer said he had sold or donated all of his holdings stashed in the cryptocurrency.
The step was aimed at averting a “conflict of interest” as the former Director of Engineering at Coinbase makes social media comments on the cryptocurrency, which could have an alleged effect on its price, according to the post.
“Some people even think I short LTC! So in a sense, it is a conflict of interest for me to hold LTC and tweet about it because I have so much influence,” Lee wrote.
The cryptocurrency enthusiast didn’t specify how many coins he sold or at what price. However, he stressed the amount of sold tokens was a small percentage of the daily volume and “did not crash the market.”
Litecoin was trading at nearly $339 per token at 13:43 GMT on Wednesday with the market value of the virtual currency reaching over $18 billion, according to CoinMarketCap data. It dropped 3.5 percent in the past 24 hours.
“This is definitely a weird feeling, but also somehow refreshing. Don’t worry. I’m not quitting litecoin. I will still spend all my time working on litecoin. When litecoin succeeds, I will still be rewarded in lots of different ways, just not directly via ownership of coins,” Lee said.