David Marcus, head of the Libra project at Facebook, told a banking seminar on Sunday that it could drop plans for a synthetic cryptocurrency and instead have a series of stablecoins based on national currencies. The company said that pegging cryptocurrencies to national currencies hasn’t become its preferred option but that it’s leaving it open as an option.
The reappraisal of the product comes after a difficult few weeks for the firm. A couple of weeks ago it was revealed some firms were thinking of pulling their support for Libra, just a few days later, one of those firms, PayPal, announced it’s withdrawal. The bad news didn’t end there, a week later Mastercard, Visa, eBay, and Stripe all announced they were withdrawing from the project over regulation concerns.
Speaking to the panel at the seminar, David Marcus is reported to have said:
“We could do it differently. Instead of having a synthetic unit ... we could have a series of stablecoins, a dollar stablecoin, a euro stablecoin, a sterling pound stable coin, etc. We could definitely approach this with having a multitude of stablecoins that represent national currencies in a tokenized digital form. That is one of the options that should be considered.”
Marcus said that the firm is still planning to ship the product in June 2020 as originally planned but admitted that it could miss that target if regulatory issues get in the way. He told Reuters that it has always been the intention of Facebook to wait until concerns have been addressed before launching the product.
Source: Reuters