Is Libra rising from the ashes like a phoenix or not?

Libra, the project initially backed by Facebook certainly had a baptism of fire when was first launched in June 2019. The founding 28 members reportedly invested $10 million each although some of them such as Paypal Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, Mercado Pago, Booking.com and eBay left Libra last October 2019.

Facebook founder Zuckerberg  was grilled in a Congressional hearing in the USA in October 2019 as  governments began to worry that with 2.6 billion active monthly users this ‘new-fangled’ Libra currency could even threaten the ‘mighty green back’  – aka the US $.

Senators in US saying it was “unconscionable for financial companies such as Visa and Mastercard to aid it in monopolising our economic infrastructure”.

Libra has pivoted and is now offering countries the ability to use their technology to create their own Digital Currencies backed by a single fiat currency as well. Libra still are working on a version of their original  multi-fiat back digital currency option

Given the soon to be launched Chinese Central Bank Digital Currency  and the increasing call from other countries to have their own Digital Currency, could we see Libra’s infrastructure being used as the basis for country or indeed a corporate Digital currencies. After all as many countries have been giving away cash due to the economic catastrophe caused by covid-19 so will people be happier using an Amazon coin of Microsoft Coin or Google token, all of whom it could be argued are in a stronger financial position that the debt redden state of many countries? If they all use the Libra platform then at least from an IT standpoint they could presumably have a degree of  interoperability!

Interesting to see Stuart Levey,who was the head of HSN]BC’s legal department and prior to this was Under Secretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence for the U.S. Treasury for 7 years, being appointed as the new CEO of Libra. How much of a fcators was this to encourage Temasek, Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund, valued at $313billion, to  join Libra. Once again demonstrating how Asians are arguably at the forefront of embracing digitisation

So second time around will The Zuck Buck or a variant receive a warmer welcome as like a phoenix it rises from ashes?

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