Libra attempts to placate everyone else

Facebook’s Libra cryptocurrency has received almost universal push-back since its announcement, so now it’s looking for ways to placate its critics.

To say Libra has had a difficult start would be an understatement. Financial regulators in the US and Europe almost immediately sounded the alarm about the prospect of a new cryptocurrency controlled by one of the world’s dominant digital platforms. They were joined by many other concerned voices in both the public and private sectors and by last week it had lost its biggest allies in the electronic payments world.

This was far from an ideal background to the first formal meeting of the Libra Association, which gathered in Geneva last week, but on the plus side at least it sorted the wheat from the chaff among its initial backers. In the event 21 founding members decided to stick around and sign the Libra Association charter, which is definitely better than nothing.

In a subsequent banking seminar Libra project lead David Marcus told the assembled bankers that Libra was open to looking at a bunch of different options for what form it would take, suggesting they might make it a stablecoin pegged to a bunch of existing fiat currencies, rather than a true cryptocurrency like Bitcoin, that would be subject to similar volatility in value.

That’s being positioned as some kind of major concession to meet regulators half way, but from day one Libra was positioned as a stablecoin, so it’s not obvious how much has changed. The transnational Financial Action Task Force recently has a meeting about stablecoin an seems to be pretty nervous about even that, so it looks like Libra has a lot of obstacles to overcome before it can expect to start winning round its many critics.