Facebook reveals Libra, its momentous new crypto, to the world

Ben Munster:

Unlike previous stablecoins, Libra will not be issued by a central party. Instead, Facebook has enlisted 27 fellow Silicon Valley titans—among them PayPal, Visa, Spotify, Mastercard, Uber, and eBay—to operate as preliminary “validator nodes” who will each share a transparent copy of a vast ledger of transactions reflecting all the activity on the network.

These collaborators, each of which pitched in $10 million for the privilege of joining the network, are the so-called “Founding Members” of the Libra Association, a Switzerland-based not-for-profit that will govern the development of the Libra network. A Byzantine system of “governance”—with each node participating in regular votes on key proposals—is intended to hold them accountable.

Facebook hopes that the system will be able to onboard billions of users, over the next five years, into a more efficient monetary system, accessible to anyone, without rent-seeking middlemen.