Libra Still On Its Way, Asserts Facebook Blockchain Lead
Earlier this month, Facebook shocked the world when it unveiled Libra — a corporate cryptocurrency meant to be rolled out to millions, even billions, across the globe. While the project has good intentions, touting the ideas of financial empowerment, it has received the short end of the stick of regulators.
However, the Libra Association and its partners have still committed to the goal of launching a digital asset ready to revolutionize the world’s financial system. In an interview with NZZ on Friday, David Marcus, a long-time Silicon Valley entrepreneur turned head of Calibra at Facebook, said that the goal is to launch Libra by 2020, not leave an open-ended launch date that will inevitably get pushed back and back.
He said that to achieve this goal, the project’s maintainers will need to be responsible for reassuring regulators and “creating a suitable regulatory environment” to ensure that Libra is not a threat to the financial, cyber, or physical safety of any nation which will have users of the crypto asset.
Marcus’s latest comments come after he reassured global netizens, central bankers, and regulators earlier this week that the cryptocurrency won’t threaten the traditional fiat system.
Per previous reports from Ethereum World News, the former PayPal executive wrote in an extensive Twitter thread that at its core, Libra is meant to be a “better payment network and system running on top of existing currencies” for a global audience, not an entirely new paradigm meant to satisfy the world’s needs.
Indeed, as Marcus goes on to point out, the cryptocurrency will be backed 1:1 by a “basket of strong currencies” (U.S. dollar, Euro, among other leading currencies, but purportedly not the Chinese yuan), disallowing printing money from thin air:
“As such there’s no new money creation, which will strictly remain the province of sovereign Nations… We also believe strong regulatory oversight preventing the Libra Association from deviating from its full 1:1 backing commitment is desirable.”
This basket reserve model means that in reality, Libra is some Frankenstein of fiat monies, not something entirely novel and non-sovereign like Bitcoin.
Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash