FacebookCoin is being announced on Tuesday! It’s called Libra, and Facebook are apparently stressing very hard that everyone should call it Libra, and not Facebook-anything. And definitely not ZuckerBucks.
The Block weren’t invited to the press embargo — so instead, they’ve scooped the entire rest of the world on the story. Here’s the complete list of Facebook’s 26 partners in Libra — who are paying $10 million each for the privilege.
The vendor partners include your payment favourites Visa, Mastercard and PayPal. Names I don’t see there include Apple Pay, Google Pay or Amazon. Maybe they’ll be along later.
The Libra Association will be a nonprofit consortium of the vendors. All that juicy, juicy personal spending data will apparently not be handed straight over to Facebook’s advertising department — though frankly, I’ll believe Facebook can keep personal data under control when I see it.
The Block also got a copy of Libra’s official announcement, due to go out Tuesday. The blog post was leaked to them “by several sources, who requested anonymity for fear of reprisal. It was not shared with The Block, CoinDesk, or any other major cryptocurrency publications.” Oh well.
Libra’s private blockchain software will be open sourced. A white paper is on the way later this month. The network is projected to go live in 2020.
There’s nothing new on Facebook’s plans to pay employees in FacebookCoin. There really should be, you know.
Nobody still has any idea why the FacebookCoin is a crypto — or why they’re doing a thing where asking the CFTC beforehand is a reasonable course of action, as if FinCEN isn’t enough to deal with.
Journalists at the press conference apparently asked directly why FacebookCoin is a crypto, and couldn’t get a sensible answer. So don’t expect a revelation on Tuesday to suddenly make sense of it all.
Can't wait for a cryptocurrency with the ethics of Uber, the censorship resistance of Paypal, and the centralization of Visa, all tied together under the proven privacy of Facebook. https://t.co/C4FymDjtFw
— Sarah Jamie Lewis (@SarahJamieLewis) June 14, 2019
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Facebook has to do a cryptocurrency because WhatsApp competitor LINE is doing a cryptocurrency.
While LINE announced their crypto, LINK (nothing to do with Chainlink) last year, I’m seeing no evidence it actually launched or anything happened with it …
https://link.network/ appears to be active – with updates as recent as 2019/05/15 (https://link.network/notice/?board-id=1987)
fair enough 🙂 Is it circulated, does it trade anywhere?