Facebook has been slowly moving towards building a native coin for their platform for the past few years. Unlike most of their other projects, this one has been shrouded in mystery as the company has not released much information about this particular project, which is not their typical behavior. Over the past few months, Facebook has been really active over the project and recently hired one of the lobbyists in the UK. And now, Facebook has signed up with more than a dozen companies including Visa Inc., Mastercard Inc., PayPal Holdings Inc. and Uber Technologies Inc. to back a new cryptocurrency.
Governance and funding
The companies which have signed up with Facebook for the project will give $10 million each and this will go into the consortium that will govern the cryptocurrency. There will be 100 partners to this project which will help Facebook raise $1 billion, which will be used to back the crypto. The funds will be held as a basket of currencies, which will provide value to the coin. The backers of the project come from a variety of industries including investment firms, telecommunication, E-commerce, travel, payment and blockchain. Each backer will get to manage a node in the network, which allows members to access and view the network. They will also reportedly get a seat in the Libra Association as node operators, which allows them to send a representative to the consortium. This approach is not unique in the blockchain world. There is already another such project called Open Blockchain headed by the Linux Foundation. However, this is not a cryptocurrency but rather a platform for developing tools and software necessary for blockchain development.
A long way for crypto
The wide spectrum of backers coupled with each of their deep penetrations in there own respective market will help both the project and crypto community as well. This kind of backing will push the crypto into mainstream without much effort. Also, such an initiative can shed some good light on crypto in general among the public. Another benefit is that it can help with one of the biggest difficulties that will be faced by crypto in the near future, and that is regulation. The consortium with their large capital will be a formidable lobbying force for crypto and coupled with their influence with governments, it can tip the scales in crypto’s favour.
Big shot
Facebook has reportedly hired Standard Chartered Bank’s head of public affairs Ed Bowles for its cryptocurrency project. He is a lobbyist for the UK wing of Standard Chartered Bank. Facebook hired the senior bank lobbyist in anticipation of the greater regulatory scrutiny in Europe over its plans to launch its own crypto assets and other financial services to its 2.4 billion users. Bowles will join the company in September, and will reportedly be its London-based director of public policy for the Libra project.
Much of what we know about the project is through speculation and leaks, even how the governing body will act is still unclear. Facebook is set to launch a whitepaper on June 18th. It was confirmed by a Europen executive at Facebook. The release of the whitepaper will give a better understanding of the project, but this will probably not contain the entire native coin.
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