Coinbase Double Charges Explained

Visa was quick to blame Coinbase for the issues that occurred this week for individuals who were making purchases on Coinbase and coming to the dreaded realization that their payments had doubled.

But it seems that the truth is Coinbase had made some changes to the code involving how the payments were processed.
This change had caused Visa to ultimately recharge the transactions.

Since then they are saying that most of the double charges have been credited back to the affected individuals.

If you’re still waiting to see these changes reflected in your account, you definitely should contact your bank that is associated with your card to receive your refund.

LitePay & LitePal

Now shifting over to Litecoin.

This week they launched their LitePay card which will allow Litecoin to be accepted anywhere Visa is accepted. The conversion will occur instantly at the time of sale and there will be a 1% settlement fee for the users.
LitePay is boasting this super low fee and fast transactions to differentiate itself from competitors like BitPay.

The team behind Litecoin is also developing what their calling LitePal, which will be a payment processor that users will be able to use in conjunction with PayPal, Western Union, Bitcoin and Litecoin. Again the fees with this service will be very low as well.

Since Bitcoin is nearly always the first to be recognized and accepted by merchants, it’s delayed transactions and higher fees might turn them off.

Now that Litecoin is addressing this issue hopefully this will help to open merchant’s eyes to the possibilities of accepting other alt coins as well.

Ethereum's New Fund: ECF

The Ethereum Community Fund, or ECF was developed to help deliver on the promises made by some of the ICOs and ultimately facilitate the progress of Ethereum’s ecosystem.

Vitalik Buterin hinted at this effort when he decided to allocate his shares from advising certain ICO projects and placing them into a private fund meant to help finance open-source projects on the Ethereum Network.

He did make the assertion that this private fund will only be available for entirely open-source projects that don’t have any kind of profit schemes, and he’ll be partial for those that are addressing scalability. We’re going to have to assume at this point that these same guidelines will apply for the ECF.

I do think it’s great that he’s staying true to his philosophy for how crypto projects should be.
But with this amount of money, I expect that the stakes are rising even higher for the development and success of the Ethereum Network.

Time will tell if throwing money into a project will translate into further innovation.

Additional Reading/Sources:

Coinbase Issues
LitePay
LitePal
Ethereum's New Fund (ECF)