https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebooks-new-cryptocurrency-gets-big-backers-11560463312 The ecosystem is growing... Visa, Mastercard, PayPal and Uber are among firms that will invest around $10 million each in consortium that will govern digital coin Project Libra revolves around a digital coin that its users could send to each other and use to make purchases both on Facebook and across the internet. PHOTO: NIALL CARSON/ZUMA PRESS By AnnaMaria Andriotis, Peter Rudegeair and Liz Hoffman Updated June 13, 2019 6:13 p.m. ET Facebook Inc. has signed up more than a dozen companies including Visa Inc.,Mastercard Inc., PayPal Holdings Inc. and Uber Technologies Inc. to back the new cryptocurrency that the social-media giant plans to unveil next week. The collection of financial firms and e-commerce companies will invest around $10 million each in a consortium that will govern the digital coin, according to people familiar with the matter. The money would be used to fund the creation of the coin, which will be pegged to a basket of government-issued currencies to avoid the wild swings that have dogged other cryptocurrencies, they said. The Wall Street Journal reported last month that Facebook was recruiting financial firms and online merchants to help launch the crypto-based payments system and was seeking to raise around $1 billion for the effort, code-named Project Libra. The secretive project, in the works for more than a year, revolves around a digital coin that its users could send to each other and use to make purchases both on Facebook and across the internet. Talks with some of the partners are ongoing, and the group’s eventual membership may change, the people added. A Facebook spokeswoman declined to comment. It has been a decade since bitcoin was born, yet consumers hardly use it or the hundreds of other cryptocurrencies to pay for things. Facebook is betting it can change that with a crypto-based payments system built around its giant social network and its billions of users. It is still not entirely clear, even to some members of the consortium, how the coin will work or what their roles will be, people familiar with the project said. Regulatory hurdles in the U.S. and elsewhere are high. Some members have expressed concerns that the token could be used to launder money and finance terrorist organizations, some of people said, a persistent problem with bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. Facebook won’t directly control the coin, nor will the individual members of the consortium known as the Libra Association. Some of the members could serve as “nodes” along the system that verifies transactions and maintains records of them, creating a brand-new payments network, according to people familiar with the setup. Financial-technology firm Stripe Inc., travel-reservation site Booking.com and Argentina-based e-commerce site MercadoLibre Inc. have signed on to the project, some of the people said, an indication of its international ambitions. Keeping the cryptocurrency network separate from Facebook’s platform gives the social-media giant some cover with users and regulators should problems arise, a big advantage at a time when it is under pressure to address privacy shortcomings. Yet Facebook, as the developer of the underlying technology, could exert considerable influence over it. Still, the lure of Facebook’s nearly 2.4 billion monthly active users was too strong for many companies to pass up. Card companies have long fretted that a technology giant could muscle into their business, creating a payment option that cuts out card networks. Participating in Libra allows them to closely monitor Facebook’s payment ambitions while sharing in the upside should the project gain traction with consumers. Facebook plans to release a white paper introducing the coin next week, according to people familiar with its plans, adopting a format popularized by bitcoin’s pseudonymous creator, Satoshi Nakamoto. The company has asked consortium members to cosign the paper, some of the people said.
hedge funds use 'bitcoin' investments to hide or launder client money. bitcoin is anonymous that is the reason 'investors' buy bitcoin. it's money launderers dream. drug dealers and anyone selling illegal service and products taking bitcoins as payment= same as cash with 5% transaction fee like western union or money gram transfers. bitcoin is digital currency and theoretically same a cash. it can be legit or fraud like fiat currency. it really depends on the 'entity' issuing or backing the 'currency' like and fiat currency.
You seem to have big concerns with money laundering. I bet you can't sleep well at night with the news below that dwarf the bitcoin market cap https://www.businessinsider.com/how-wachovia-laundered-billions-in-mexican-drug-money-2011-4 The newspaper's investigation shows how the bank - now owned by Wells Fargo - moved $378.4 billion from powerful drug cartels into currency exchange houses in Mexico. That's one-third of Mexico's annual GDP. https://www.marketwatch.com/story/n...1-million-money-laundering-scandal-2018-02-21 Despite the heavy financial penalty for HSBC following the scandal, eleven banks have incurred higher fines than them during the last decade. MarketWatch recently revealed that banks have been fined a total of $243 billion since the financial crisis with HSBC paying out $4.5 billion.
Money laundering has been around since banks existed. Money laundering is money from 'illegal' activities. 1. stolen money 2. drug money or any money from illegal activity. maybe the powers to be should focus their resource on the stolen money,drug money or other illegal activities. The banks don't make money from money launderers same with casinos. money launderers use them to launder money. you have corrupt employees who help these people launder money. other than that,,banks don't accept cas deposits from criminal activity sources.
Bullish for BTC. Might see ads again for crypto on Facebook otherwise would be accused of being a monopoly. But I think the fact that it’ll be centralized will keep it from dethroning BTC. With time the fact of combining social media data with payments is something that increasingly privacy concerned membership will say, “nah.” Big brother’s dream team.
You mean the Ponzi scheme is growing. Why don´t you ask professional investors whether they would invest into this crap? Because professional know what a rigged "crpyto market" is! And don´t pretend that digital currencies didn´t exist some 70 years ago.
The important takeaway is mainstream adoption. Facebook has billions of users worldwide, let's imagine for a second that a majority of them become Facebook (Libra?) coin users using the Facebook app as a wallet and feel comfortable using it for transactions of goods and services. These same users would find it very easy to install a bitcoin wallet and start using it in the same way they're using the Facebook wallet. At one time, I had several different cryptocurrencies wallets on my phone and tablets, and over a dozen wallets on my laptop. They all function in a similar way. If Facebook coin succeeds, and I'm hoping it does in a big way, it doesn't mean bitcoin will fail or go to zero. There's a reason we have Apple Pay, Android Pay, Samsung Pay, Visa, MC, PayPal, Venmo, Ali Pay, WeChat Pay, etc.... There's a lot of opportunities for profits in the payment systems.