US lawmakers formally demand a halt to Facebook’s Libra cryptocurrency

As threatened a couple of weeks ago, the House Financial Services Committee has called for Facebook to halt its cryptocurrency plans.

The demand came in the form of a letter signed by the Chairwoman of the Committee Maxine Walters and a few other members of the House of Representatives that share her concerns. The letter was addressed to CEO Mark Zuckerberg, COO Sheryl Sandberg and CEO of Calibra, the company Facebook created to exploit the Libra opportunity, David Marcus.

“We write to request that Facebook and its partners immediately agree to a moratorium on any movement forward on Libra—its proposed cryptocurrency and Calibra—its proposed digital wallet,” opened the letter. “It appears that these products may lend themselves to an entirely new global financial system that is based out of Switzerland and intended to rival U.S. monetary policy and the dollar. This raises serious privacy, trading, national security, and monetary policy concerns for not only Facebook’s over 2 billion users, but also for investors, consumers, and the broader global economy.”

The letter went on to detail quite how worrisome this disruption to the established way of things is and how little Facebook has done so far to allay these worries. The main concern seems to be similar to that attached to all cryptocurrency, that it will provide liquidity to ‘bad actors’. The difficulty of the US poking its nose into an organization based in Switzerland seems to be the main national security concern. They also spend a paragraph reviewing Facebook’s dodgy privacy track record.

“Because Facebook is already in the hands of a over quarter of the world’s population, it is imperative that Facebook and its partners immediately cease implementation plans until regulators and Congress have an opportunity to examine these issues and take action,” concludes the letter. “During this moratorium, we intend to hold public hearings on the risks and benefits of cryptocurrency-based activities and explore legislative solutions. Failure to cease implementation before we can do so, risks a new Swiss-based financial system that is too big to fail.”

Facebook and its partners must have anticipated this kind of reaction when they made their announcement. The Libra project is so grand in its scope and ambition they couldn’t possibly have expected authorities to adopt a laissez faire attitude, even if Facebook had a spotless reputation. It’s also hard to see how Facebook can do anything other than comply with the request and prepare itself for an exhaustive oversight process. Don’t expect to see Libra in the wild anytime soon.