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None of Libra’s founding partners have anted up their $10m entry fee. So far no agreement has been made, and the fee was not discussed at the Libra Association’s first general assembly last week.
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“Libra will be backed mostly by dollars and I believe it will extend America’s financial leadership… As well as our democratic values and oversight around the world. If America doesn’t innovate, our financial leadership is not guaranteed.”
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Zuckerberg reassured that Libra would operate under a coalition of partners and independently from Facebook, but he also made clear that Facebook will not help launch the payments system anywhere in the world until U.S. regulators approve.
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“The future in five years, if we don’t have a good answer, is basically China re-wiring” a large part of the world “with a digital renminbi running on their controlled blockchain,” Marcus said. He warned about the prospect of “having a whole part of the world completely blocked from U.S. sanctions and protected from U.S. sanctions and having a new digital reserve currency” with no alternative.
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Governments, central banks and regulators need to recognise new opportunities for faster and cheaper payments, particularly cross-border, and greater financial inclusion. So far, however, cryptocurrencies are overhyped, the new payment platforms useful and Libra worrying.
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In China, where cryptocurrency exchanges are banned, people can pay cash over the counter to get Tether with few questions asked and from there trade Tether for Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.
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One of the untold stories of the past few years is that the CFTC, the Treasury, the SEC and the [National Economic Council] director at the time, Gary Cohn, believed that the launch of bitcoin futures would have the impact of popping the bitcoin bubble. And it worked.
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Crypto investor Michael Terpin has written an open letter to US FCC chairman Ajit Pai requesting urgent action on SIM swapping fraud. He asked the regulator to make mobile carriers hide customer passwords from employees and to provide a “no port” option, whereby customers would have to go through a company’s fraud department before transferring their SIM information to a new phone. In a SIM swap, criminals pose as the owners of a victim’s mobile phone number, convincing telecom providers to grant them access to the SIM card.
