The creator of litecoin, one of the major cryptocurrencies that competes with bitcoin, said that he sold his stake, a major about-face in a world often characterized by true believers and tech evangelists.
Charlie Lee, a former Google engineer who created litecoin in 2011, announced on the social-media site Reddit Wednesday that he was selling and donating his litecoin tokens, though he isn’t leaving the project itself. He didn’t disclose the size of his stake in the currency, which has an overall value of about $17 billion. He wrote in the post that the disposal represented a small percentage of daily trading volume, which, according to research site coinmarketcap.com, has been about $1.8 billion in December.
Mr. Lee, who didn’t respond to a request for comment, said he felt he was in a position where anytime he talked about the currency in public, he was being accused of trying to drive the price up for his own gain. He added that he’d made enough from it over the years that he didn’t actually need to still hold it. Selling the stake, he said, was the best way for him to continue overseeing the digital currency’s growth without any conflicts.
Until this summer when he left to work full time on litecoin, Mr. Lee was the director of engineering at Coinbase, which operates a large platform for buying and selling virtual currencies.
Like bitcoin and the second-largest virtual currency ethereum, litecoin is an open-source software project, with Mr. Lee leading a team of volunteer coders and developers. Unlike those other digital currencies, litecoin initially didn’t have a nonprofit foundation that could guide that development. This spring, Mr. Lee and others formed the nonprofit Litecoin Foundation for that purpose.
Litecoin was trading around $345 before Mr. Lee’s announcement and hit an all-time high of $375 on Tuesday. It fell to as low as $309 after the announcement, and early Thursday was trading around $322, down about 7% from before the post by Mr. Lee.
“Don’t worry. I’m not quitting litecoin,” he wrote. “When Litecoin succeeds, I will still be rewarded in lots of different ways, just not directly via ownership of coins.” He added in a tweet: “You can’t compare me to a CEO selling all his shares. I’m the creator. Litecoin is like my kid. I’m more invested in it than someone holding” $1 million worth of the currency.
The move comes as longtime holders of cryptocurrencies weigh whether the record-high prices should prompt some selling to diversify and take chips off the table.
So-called altcoins—alternative versions of bitcoin— have been rising along with bitcoin itself, sometimes more dramatically. Litecoin’s rally has been among the most notable, but others such as Bitcoin Cash, ripple and ethereum have grown even bigger.
Less than 12 months ago, litecoin began 2017 at $4, and apart from a brief spurt in late 2013 into 2014—when it rose to as high as $40—it had never previously traded above $5.
Write to Paul Vigna at paul.vigna@wsj.com
