The creator of the world’s fifth-biggest cryptocurrency cashed in his profits during a 75-fold rally this year.
Charlie Lee, a San Francisco-based software engineer who founded litecoin in 2013, said in a reddit post that he sold and donated all of his holdings over the past few days. The disposal is aimed at preventing a “conflict of interest” when Lee makes comments on social media about the digital currency that could influence its price, he said.
“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,” Lee said. “For the first time in 6+ years, I no longer own a single LTC” other than a few collector’s coins.
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Lee declined to comment in the post on how many coins he sold or at what price, but noted that the amount was a small percentage of daily volume and “did not crash the market.”
Litecoin has climbed more than 9% percent in the past five days to $330.07, according to data from coinmarketcap.com. It slumped more than 7% on Wednesday, following most digital currencies lower after a string of bad news stories involving hacking and interventions by regulators. Lee insisted in his post that his sale wasn’t a sign that he has lost faith in the cryptocurrency.
“I will still spend all my time working on litecoin,” he said. “When litecoin succeeds, I will still be rewarded in lots of different ways, just not directly via ownership of coins.”
Read: What Is Litecoin, and Why Is It Beating Bitcoin This Year?
And how does it feel to take profits on a high from the crypto boom that has been described as the biggest financial bubble of all time? “Weird” but also “somehow refreshing,” Lee wrote.