Digital Currency/Stablecoin/Tokenization Series: Has Facebook’s Libra Totally Disappeared?

Entire cryptocurrency industry, some sovereign governments and central banking communities across the globe have been meticulous post Facebook’s announcement of Libra blockchain payment network. Following the US Congressional grilling Mark Zuckerberg over Facebook’s Libra objectives and their mechanism in the recent past, a legislator, Tom Emmer, has drawn a stance towards introducing a new U.S. crypto bill that could provide token sales legal protection from SEC enforcement actions.

The House Financial Services Committee, Federal reserve chairman Jerome Powell also said that the current Libra framework has not absolutely addressed wider concerns around issues such as “Money laundering, data protection, and consumer privacy.” Powell said these concerns “will need to be addressed very thoroughly and carefully,” by Libra.

Amid all these undesirable developments for Marc Zuckerberg, their dream crypto-project appears to be fragile, the team ‘Libra’ itself has gone into a pessimistic mode. The prospective board members of governing body began marching to step out from the association. Thereby, Facebook’s earlier assertivenesshas now been shifted to a cautious approach. 

Hence, with that perspective, the Libra Engineering team has recently published a 2nd roadmap titled “Libra Core Roadmap 2” for Libra Core, which happens to be the mainnet  framework that fortifies the intended Libra network. Built on open-source software, Libra’s permissioned blockchain intends to enable developers, companies and consumers to build their own projects through the ecosystem. One can stay updated about their latest developments at the blog spot.

For now, Facebook has emphasized the three key areas: 

1) Delivering mainnet features in priority order, 

2) Defining launch criteria for going from Libra pre-mainnet to mainnet, and 

3) Educating and including the Libra community so that they can be valuable contributors to the Libra project.

In the recent past, Facebook has come up with an expansionary networking intentions through its payment services by launching Facebook Pay, a service platform to ensure the secured money transfer across their product-line of Facebook, such as within the gamut of Facebook Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp.

Cross-border transaction such wire-transfers to emerging countries has surged a record high in 2018, according to the World Bank’s latest Migration and Development Brief.

Foreseeing the scope in the traditional financial world that could eventually be replaced with FinTech arena and the potential prospects of the underlying developments of the blockchain as a technology, desirable things might happen for Facebook in the days to come.