Litecoin Foundation, the body behind the LTC cryptocurrency, has acquired a 9.9% stake in German WEG Bank as part of a strategic partnership with Swiss blockchain development company TokenPay, the latter announced.
TokenPay, which bought the 9.9% stake in WEG in May, has now transferred it to the Litecoin Foundation in exchange for a “broad and comprehensive marketing and technology service agreement” to support its cryptocurrency and exchange services, it said in a statement on Tuesday.
After unsuccessful attempts to open a bank account, Singapore-based Litecoin Foundation “bought a bank”, board member Xinxi Wang tweeted on Wednesday.
Presently, it is unclear what will be the immediate effects of the acquisition for the LTC coin as the stake is a minority one and WEG Bank is mainly specialized in real estate loans.
LTC founder and Litecoin Foundation managing director Charlie Lee said:
“I’m looking forward to integrating Litecoin with the WEG Bank AG and all the various services it has to offer, to make it simple for anyone to buy and use Litecoin.”
Lee was appointed as an advisor to TokenPay as part of the partnership, which includes the foundation’s support for TPAY and EFIN tokens, eFin decentralized exchange and a possible TokenPay e-commerce service in the WEGBank FinTech platform.
"The partnership [...] might at first come unexpectedly for a very conservative institution like us,” Matthias von Hauff, founder and CEO of WEG Bank commented.
“But we have thoroughly and diligently examined the prospects of a common future, and we became convinced that the future of banking will make adoption of such modern payment methods inevitable.”
TokenPay bought the 9.9% stake in WEG Bank with an option to further purchase up to 90% of the lender. After transferring this shareholding to the Litecoin Foundation, the Swiss company purchased another 9.9% of WEG, while awaiting for a pending German regulatory approval of its plan to buy the 90% majority stake.
Litecoin is presently the sixth largest cryptocurrency with more than $4.4 billion market cap. It changed hands at slightly above $77 at 09:04 UTC, up 0.6% for the last 24 hours in a falling market.
This article appeared first on Cryptovest