Facebook was coming for their money. On June 18 2019, the social media group launched a digital currency called Libra that aimed to do nothing less than “reinvent money and transform the global economy”.
With 2.7bn people already using one of the group’s apps across its Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp brands, financial analysts believed it could realise up to $19bn additional revenue by 2021, in part because it would allow those users to send money to each other easily without ever leaving Facebook’s ecosystem.
What took insiders by surprise when the announcement came was that, while spearheaded by Facebook, it was from the newly minted Libra Association, a consortium of 28 organisations including major brands like Visa, PayPal, Uber and Spotify.
Hidden behind the technocratic language of an “efficient medium of exchange for billions of people around the world” that would “grow into a global financial infrastructure” was a promise, or, depending on your point of view, a threat: what we have done for social media, music, and taxis we are going to do to money. The difference from those industries that had already been “disrupted”?
This time they were going after the state, and the state was not going to throw open the doors to its vaults without a fight.
Read more: https://www.ft.com/content/981aa086-98a5-449a-8042-bb816f4a9cd5
