Today, tech journalists are reporting revelations of a new plan in South Korea to install 13,000 new ATMs able to process Litecoin withdrawals and remittances.
The remittance feature will allow for the frictionless sending of money between parties.
“The partnership will see LTC integrated onto MeconCash’s M.Pay payments platform,” writes Cointelegraph reporter Samuel Haig. “Litecoin will also be accepted as payment on MeconCash’s retail platform MeconMall, and to pay for games that accept M.Pay rewards. According to CryptoCompare, 24-hour trade between Litcoin and won produced nearly $4.3 million in trade — comprising 0.82 percent of total trade at press time.”
Other cryptocurrency firms have also jumped into the fray – Haig reports Ripple has worked on plans to partner with companies for remittance facilitation in South Korea.
However, the MeConCash project is a big move. This news becomes more interesting when you contrast it with current numbers of ATMs nationwide.
For instance, South Korea now has around 7000 Bitcoin ATMs in total, according to expert estimates.
That means after the Litecoin rollout, there will be almost twice as many ATMs able to process LTC as there will be BTC-ready machines, making LTC “the Cola of choice” in that crypto-aware country.
By contrast, in America, where Bitcoin is king, we currently have around 2000 Bitcoin ATMs scattered throughout all 50 states.
Look for the ATM activity to ramp up as different coins vie for visibility and easy access in national markets.
“The market demand for cryptocurrency ATMs has grown rapidly,” wrote Melanie Kramer at NewsBTC last year. “Cryptocurrency owners need ATMs to quickly exchange and spend their invested cash when they need to, and the competition between cryptocurrency ATM providers is heating up.”
Since then, we’ve seen lots of headlines like today’s. Afre you factoring ATMs into your crypto investment plan?
