Litecoin has enjoyed a number of recent partnerships in the consumer finance sector. Given these new arrangements, using Litecoin for payments involved with routine life is becoming easier than ever.

Litecoin, abbreviated as LTC, fell to around 100,000 transactions around the start of the month. However, the volume has rebounded well, going over 140,000. This may have had something to do with a tweet from the Litecoin Foundation announcing a launch of their LTC Visa ebit card. The fintech firm of Unbanked is behind this card.

If you look at the homepage of this card, prospective customers first have to register for their own Litecoin card account. They would then deposit LTC into a particular wallet address before passing their Know-Your-Customer verification and then receiving their virtual Litecoin card. Despite all these steps, the card service states that this whole registration process takes most people under 5 minutes to accomplish.

This Litecoin card is intended to let users spent any or all LTC they have at every digital merchant using Visa for payment processing. The Litecoin Foundation currently estimates this to be nearly 50 million merchants.

A day after the initial tweet, the Litecoin Foundation put up another. This one focused on the partnership between Verifone and BitPay. Just by itself, Verifone is among the planet's largest POS payment processors, as they handle approximately $40 billion annually in overall transactions. On the other hand, BitPay itself handles payment processor handling for various cryptocurrencies. Their 60,000 monthly consumer transactions include Litecoin/LTC, Ethereum/ETH, and Bitcoin/BTC.

Litecoin started in 2011. The stated goal at the time was that if Bitcoin were to be gold, then Litecoin would be silver. Cryptwerk data says that, as of the time of writing, 3,111 global businesses take LTC as direct payment. This is up from the known 2,230 business who did so a year ago.

Merchant acceptance of LTC as digital currency is just under half of what Bitcoin's rate is, which fits with being the silver to Bitcoin's gold.