Facebook’s Libra

Facebook’s Libra

Facebook just announced the release of its much-anticipated whitepaper detailing its foray into the world of cryptocurrencies. Facebook’s crypto, named Libra, will run on a blockchain network secured at launch by 100 distributed or nodes. 28 companies have signed up to be the node-running members at launch. As more nodes are added, Facebook says Libra will become more fully decentralized.

The Libra blockchain will go live in 2020, with the Libra Association, a Switzerland-based non-profit organization, set up recently by Facebook. As stated in the whitepaper, Project Libra aims to create a “more accessible, more connected global financial system.” According to the whitepaper, Members of the Libra Association will consist of geographically distributed and diverse businesses, nonprofit and multilateral organizations, and academic institutions. The initial group of organizations that will work together on finalizing the association’s charter and become “Founding Members” upon its completion are, by industry:

• Payments: Mastercard, PayPal, PayU (Naspers’ fintech arm), Stripe, Visa
• Technology and marketplaces: Booking Holdings, eBay, Facebook/Calibra, Farfetch, Lyft, Mercado Pago, Spotify AB, Uber Technologies, Inc.
• Telecommunications: Iliad, Vodafone Group
• Blockchain: Anchorage, Bison Trails, Coinbase, Inc., Xapo Holdings Limited
• Venture Capital: Andreessen Horowitz, Breakthrough Initiatives, Ribbit Capital, Thrive Capital, Union Square Ventures
• Nonprofit and multilateral organizations, and academic institutions: Creative Destruction Lab, Kiva, Mercy Corps, Women’s World Banking

In the initial version of the system, only founding members will be able to be a node that participates in the consensus algorithm. Over time, it’s designed to transition the node membership from these founding members who have a stake in the creation of the ecosystem to people who hold Libra and have a stake in the ecosystem as a whole. — Ben Maurer, Facebook’s blockchain technical lead

“Move” is a new programming language for implementing custom transaction logic and “smart contracts” on the Libra Blockchain. Facebook says that Move is designed with safety and security as the highest priorities. Specifically, Move is designed to prevent assets from being cloned. It enables “resource types” that constrain digital assets to the same properties as physical assets: a resource has a single owner, it can only be spent once, and the creation of new resources is restricted.

To be sure, critics are not far away. Noted economist and cryptocurrency skeptic Nouriel Roubini has said that the project is not really crypto.

It has nothing to do with blockchain. Fully private, controlled, centralized, verified and authorized by a small number of permissioned nodes. So what is crypto or blockchain about it? None.

However, to learn more about the project, it is best to dig into the whitepaper and other resources and learn for yourself:

Originally published at https://proteum.substack.com.