The BBC today published an article in which it claims that Facebook is rethinking its plans for the Libra stablecoin project.
According to the BBC, in fact, resistance to the approval of the project by regulators is actually forcing Facebook to think about appropriate changes, considering that the company has repeatedly stated that it is only willing to put its stablecoin on the market with the approval of regulators.
One of the issues at stake, as already anticipated in December last year, concerns the basket of currencies backing the stablecoin.
As argued by the President of the Swiss Confederation, Ueli Maurer, the basket of currencies that would support Libra is not accepted by the national banks, and since Libra is based in Switzerland, Maurer’s words in December sounded like a kind of death knell for the project if they decided to go ahead with it.
The co-founder of Wirex, Georgy Sokolov, also expressed strong doubts about the Libra project to The Cryptonomist some time ago, precisely because the stablecoin was supposed to be backed by a basket of several currencies.
Even according to Bloomberg and the technical website The Information, the Libra project would now be oriented not on a single stablecoin backed by a basket of fiat currencies, but on a system with several digital versions of consolidated currencies, including the dollar and the euro.
As a result, the Libra Association, based in Switzerland, should continue to exist and coordinate the project, although the project may not involve issuing a single stablecoin but several stablecoins each supported by a single fiat currency.
On the other hand, this is what has already been happening for some time on the crypto market, where there are now dozens of stablecoins anchored to fiat currencies, but none of the successful ones is based on a basket of several currencies.
The policy and communications manager of the Libra Association, Dante Disparte, said:
“The Libra Association has not altered its goal of building a regulatory compliant global payment network, and the basic design principles that support that goal have not been changed nor has the potential for this network to foster future innovation”.
Facebook has stated that it is still fully committed to the Libra project and appears to be planning to launch its Calibra wallet in the fall of 2020.