Have you heard the news Facebook announced yesterday? How will this new announcement affect Facebook and our society as a whole? On Tuesday, June 18th, 2019, Facebook revealed their new cryptocurrency known as Libra. Along with the currency being unveiled, an association was created and announced as well, known as the Libra Association. There are twenty-eight members who make up the association currently, and they will oversee all things Libra.
Some of these members include Vodafone, Mastercard, Visa, Stripe, Uber, and Spotify. The blockchain technology they are modeling is not an open source, only those in the associate will have the ability to run nodes. Facebook is working on advancing their technology in order to hopefully allow the public to have access to the blockchain and node's feature in the next five years. There is some argumentation that in the current state, Facebook's cryptocurrency is more like a fiat currency. Libra is currently tied to fiat currencies and securities, not truly making it a cryptocurrency. While it is not quite a cryptocurrency because of this, it does give merchants security that the value of it will not dramatically fluctuate from day to day. This would allow more merchants to be willing to accept Libra as a form of payment.
The ultimate goal for Facebook's latest money form is to provide a more stable, free, and user-friendly way for individuals to send or spend money. There will be third-party wallets that can host the money, and in progress is the ability to make in-store-payments and use point-of-sale systems such as square. Facebook hopes that the Libra currency becomes the way of the future since the currency has not launched yet, there is no way to tell how successful this will be. When the currency becomes public in 2020, then we will be able to track the currencies popularity and success rate.
