Litecoin Foundation Running Out of Money

The Litecoin Foundation (LF) barely has any money left, down from more than one million in income last year to $70,000 in minus this year.

That one million income was mainly due to a donation of $830,000, but they also made about $200,000 on merchandise sales.

What is meant by that is not clear, but presumably it’s t-shirts with hodl on it and the Litecoin Foundation Summit, their conference.

For this year they puzzlingly made an $80,000 loss from merchandize which costed $280,000, but brought in only $200,000.

How you can lose money from selling t-shirts is not clear, but it might be more to do with the conference which is to begin in just a few days with Ron Paul speaking.

Charlie Lee, Litecoin’s founder, said “we just did a quick estimate and our current runway is between 1 to 2 years depending on how the finances for the Litecoin Summit goes.”

He further clarified “we have about $200k today, which is about 2 years of runway.”

The actual figures show they spending $137,000 on staff, $36,000 on marketing, $24,500 on legal fees, and $4,500 on advertising, making it unclear how this $200,000 is to last for two years.

In addition they have some non-public deal with WEG Bank and TokenPay which seems to have cost them $2.8 million.

They bought 10% of WEG Bank last year with an option to acquire another 80%. So this $2.8 million might be the cost of that option.

The foundation is apparently spending just $1,500 on software and cloud services, which might be just their website, with no cost stated for development.

That may well be because they don’t have any, with Charlie Lee himself selling all his Litecoin at the peak in December 2017.