According to a Financial Times report, Facebook’s controversial Libra cryptocurrency could launch in January 2021, but it won’t be as impressive as originally planned and is still awaiting approval in some regions.
The digital token was announced in 2019 and initially received substantial support from various financial households such as Visa and Mastercard, which formed the Libra association to collaborate on the global effort. However, the project immediately caught the attention of the US Senate Banking Committee, which was eager to get more details on the ambitious initiative, given Facebook’s poor track record of protecting consumer privacy on its platform.
It wasn’t long before these concerns were somehow proven to be true, as fake ads for the unpublished cryptocurrency began flooding Facebook and the company was quickly overwhelmed trying to remove them in a timely manner.
Then, high-profile Libra backers such as PayPal, Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, and eBay individually signaled that they were withdrawing from the project for fear of attracting unnecessary attention from antitrust agencies that were investigating Facebook’s every move.
As such, the Libra Association has turned to producing one or more “hard coins” pegged to the value of international currencies, which should help launch it sooner.
Due to severe regulatory backlash in some regions such as the EU, Libra is likely to be released as a single coin backed by the US dollar and gradually move to add more tokens based on other currencies. Apart from that, you will be able to use Libra tokens on WhatsApp and Messenger, in a standalone app called Novi (formerly Calibra).
