San Francisco, – Facebook has partnered with several technology, financial and e-commerce companies to take out a cryptocurrency of its own to carry out transactions between individuals and establishments, The Wall Street Journal published today.
The currency project has the support, in addition to the social network, of companies such as Visa, Mastercard, PayPal and Uber, which will be part of a consortium named “Asociación Libra” (the operation has received the name of Libra Project) and will act as a supervisor of the cryptocurrency.
Thus, Facebook will not exercise direct control over the currency, but this will be collegiate by all members of the association, despite being the company that leads Mark Zuckerberg the main driver of this initiative, which will be made public official next week.
Each participating company will contribute around 10 million dollars to the consortium of management of the cryptocurrency, whose value will be linked to a basket of different international currencies to endow it with the stability that Bitcoin does not have, for example.
In addition to the aforementioned companies, other participants in the project according to the New York newspaper are the payment company Stripe, the travel booking portal Booking.com and the Argentine e-commerce firm MercadoLibre.
Not having direct control of the cryptocurrency (something that had been initially speculated) will give Facebook more room to act in the face of the more than likely intense scrutiny that will be submitted to governments and regulators around the world, and especially jealous of the company in matters of privacy and management of user data.
Despite the relatively little success that cryptocurrencies have achieved so far, if the Facebook project and the rest of the Free Association companies gain traction among Internet users, the implications for the global financial industry could be gigantic, since almost a third of the world population has an active account in the social network (EFEUSA).
