Libra: today the first hearing in Congress

Today the director of the Libra project, David Marcus, will be called to answer questions about Facebook’s cryptocurrency during the first hearing at the US Congress.

Marcus will speak at the Senate Committee on Banking, while tomorrow there will also be a hearing at the House Committee on Financial Services. 

The doubts raised by American politicians about the Libra project are manifold and range from the possible lack of transparency to issues related to privacy and monetary policy. 

Following the statements of the chairman of the House Committee on Financial Services and those of Donald Trump, and after the doubts also raised by the governor of the Fed, yesterday it was the Secretary of Treasury Steven Mnuchin who declared his opposition to the Libra project. 

“Could be misused by money launderers and terrorist financiers.” 

He also added that, according to him, this is now a matter of national security.

“Cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin have been exploited to support billions of dollars of illicit activity like cyber crime, tax evasion, extortion, ransomware, illicit drugs and human trafficking”.

However, CNBC has also received Facebook’s official commentary on these statements. 

“The president does have concerns as it relates to bitcoin and cryptocurrencies — those are legitimate concerns that we have been working on for a long period of time”.

Libra also said that they expected critical feedback on their project from regulators, central banks and legislators around the world and that they decided to announce the launch of their cryptocurrency a year in advance so they could have the time to discuss it with them. 

According to some analysts, these doubts concerning the Facebook stablecoin project are also putting pressure on the price of bitcoin, which has fallen in recent days from over 12,000 dollars to just over 10,000. For this reason, the results of the hearings at the Congress today and tomorrow could have an impact from this point of view as well. 

Generally, this type of hearing, with governmental or parliamentary bodies in the US, tends to have some kind of impact on the price of bitcoin, sometimes positive and other times negative.