Well, it has been in the pipelines for a year or more but it seems that Facebook is getting ready to launch its own cryptocurrency to rival Bitcoin. The largest social media company in the world, that also owns WhatsApp and Instagram, have been hiring top engineers and crypto specialists and have just set up their very own fintech company in crypto-friendly Switzerland. Apparently the city of Zug is the world’s “Silicon Valley of crypto” as multiple companies flock there to make a base and Facebook is probably one of the biggest yet to set up shop.
Gone are the days when we simply used Facebook or their subsidiaries WhatsApp and Instagram to connect with friends. Soon they will become a wallet, a bank and a PayPal equivalent for their billions of customers. Facebook has gone fintech and is now an e-commerce company. Their Project Libra was registered in Geneva on 2 May as a blockchain based payment and investing system. Cryptocurrency will truly have arrived in the mainstream when Libra launches.
Top Bitcoin investor Mike Novogratz has called this move by Facebook “stunningly important” presumably for the obvious reason that with so many users, the social media giant already has a captive audience or a dedicated customer base and they will all be automatically exposed to the opportunity for buying cryptocurrency. If it’s on the blockchain it’s a crypto, and presumably that is what Libracoin will be, though it may have a way to go still from the current beta testing stage.
Ex-PayPal staff are now working at Facebook to make the Libracoin (the final name is not confirmed yet) the new e-commerce tool of the planet, specifically for WhatsApp users. By planning to launch it first in India, where they already have over 200 million users, WhatApp will facilitate remittance payments for Indians working abroad to send money back home. The near instant and seamless cross-border capabilities of blockchain to send cryptocurrency anywhere almost for free, has huge use-case potential and will take off like a rocket to the moon. This will be a “stable coin” so will presumably remain at a fixed price, pegged to a basket of international currencies, and not just to the dollar as other stable coins currently are.
With the billions of users of Facebook’s multiple social media platforms, there is a chance that the Libra may even become more popular than Bitcoin. Of course, having said that, we must remember that the Indian government has been actively suppressing Bitcoin and cryptocurrency in India, effectively banning it, so it will be interesting to see how this showdown between the private corporation and the sovereign government unfolds. Multinational corporations now have more power than entire countries and are able to ride roughshod over their laws and standards voted in by their own citizens. In some cases in this NWO scenario your vote and laws are worthless and meaningless as globalist giants dominate the world economy and dictate like tyrants the parameters of their desired trade in products that you and your government may have already deemed below your standards, dangerous or even toxic. GMOs is one such example.
If Facebook pull this off, it will give huge credibility to cryptocurrency, particularly in the eyes of institutional investors who will gain confidence and be more eager to invest their billions of dollars into the crypto industry. However, Facebook may have some hurdles to jump first, considering the suspicion we see them with after the data breach and privacy question since the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Who would want all their personal financial data open to surveillance like that?
Also if it comes to fruition Facebook’s Libracoin will very possibly become a gateway crypto for the billions of users to then find out about and look into Bitcoin, Ethereum and the other established cryptocurrencies. Furthermore, other corporations will see the success of Libracoin and may also want to jump in to the crypto sector with their own digital currency, releasing a snowball effect.
“I believe that it should be as easy to send money to someone as it is to send a photo.”
Mark Zuckerburg.
With 20% of Facebook’s staff at Project Libra being ex-PayPal employees (including the former president of PayPal, David Marcus) we can clearly predict the obvious direction that they’re taking for the future of social media. They may be very secretive about it – particularly since cryptocurrency is still somewhat unknown or even suspect among the mainstream users of social media – but eventually users may not even know they are using a Bitcoin-like method of payment, and will just be happy to accept what the giant Facebook gives them, as long as it works and they can send their money anywhere instantly.
Let’s see where this goes. With so much time, money and man hours already spent on developing the Libracoin, it looks bound to succeed, though the US Senate committee is already interrogating Zuckerburg with skepticism to see just how legal, safe, private and legitimate this new revolutionary concept is. This has possibly never been done before – the marriage of crypto and social media – except of course for platforms like steemit.com and others, where blog posters are rewarded in crypto, but certainly not to this degree and magnitude.
With Facebook’s 2.38 billion monthly active users globally, this could change the playing field of Bitcoin and the cryptocurrency industry completely, taking it to another level only dreamed of by the founder Satoshi Nakamoto and the crypto anarchists and cypherpunks of a decade ago when Bitcoin was first launched. What do you think the effect will be on Bitcoin and the world if Facebook succeeds in launching its Libracoin crytpo? Leave your comments below and let us know.
Ref: https://www.ccn.com/facebook-unexpectedly-crypto-friendly-switzerland
Pic: Pixabay