The Libra Association has officially applied for a payment system licence from FINMA Switzerland.
The association is based in Geneva, Switzerland, so the application to operate as a payment system was sent to the Swiss Federal Financial Market Supervisory Authority.
As the CEO of the Poseidon Group, Lars Schlichting, reveals, the whitepaper was amended prior to the application, and the application submitted differs significantly from the original project.
It provides not only for a multi-currency stablecoin but also for a single-currency stablecoin.
The application will be assessed in cooperation with some 20 other financial authorities.
As announced more than a month ago, the original idea of proposing a single stablecoin anchored to a basket of fiat currencies would have meant the failure of the initiative, so the association was forced to modify the whitepaper to adapt it to the more or less explicit requests received from the financial authorities.
It should not be forgotten that the CEO of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, some time ago promised to address all doubts before launching the project on the market, so if the regulators had raised insurmountable objections the only solution to move forward was to adapt the project to their demands.
This seems to be exactly what has happened in recent months, so at this point, it is plausible to imagine that FINMA could grant Libra the requested licence.
The process of granting the licence under the Swiss supervisory law has officially begun, but its outcome and duration remain unknown.
FINMA reveals that, like all new projects, the application is not necessarily already complete, but allows the licensing process to begin.
The agency will thoroughly analyse the application, and will probably impose additional requirements, in particular, to ensure that the strict national and international standards relating to payment infrastructure and the fight against money laundering are maintained.
As usual, no public information will be provided on the status of the current process or its expected duration.
It will be necessary to wait until the final outcome is published to know how it will turn out or to hope for some indiscretion coming perhaps from some internal member of the Libra Association.
The initial hypothesis of a launch of the project in mid-2020 now seems really unlikely, while the hypothesis of a launch in autumn still seems plausible.
