Approximately three months after the project was unveiled for the first time, Facebook’s Libra stablecoin is still making headlines, but not for promising reasons, sadly. The asset, being linked to a company with famous privacy breach cases througout time, has had a hard time on the regulations side.
In the latest development, it was reported by news network CNBC that France has the intention of blocking the development of the Libra project in European soil, which is undoubtedly a huge hit for the social networking giant and its crypto payments network.
Cited by CNBC, the French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire stated that the European nation cannot allow the launch Libra, Facebook’s proposed crypto project, in the continent because the “monetary sovereignty of states is at stake.”
A Firm Stance
Le Maire’s position on the matter is, at least according to what he has shown, firm. He delivered his thougts about the matter in Paris, France’s capital city, at the inauguration ceremony of the OECD Global Blockchain Policy Forum 2019.
“All these concerns around Libra are serious. So I want to say this with a lot of clarity: I want to be absolutely clear: in these conditions, we cannot authorize the development of Libra on European soil,” he is quoted as saying at the gathering.
France is not the only country in which Facebook and its associated projects Libra (the cryptocurrency and payments network) and Calibra (the digital wallet) have had issues on the regulations’ side. Other European nations have opposed to the project, as have several high-profile American congressmen.
Widespread Concerns about the Project
To be more specific, regulators and lawmakers in the United States of America have made it clear that they are worried. They have repeatedly expressed their concerns “with allowing a large tech company to create a privately controlled, alternative global currency.”
Almost immediately upon its revealing in the month of June, Le Maire made it known that he would ask the social network company for guarantees to ensure that Libra would not be exploitable and used to finance activities such as terrorism.
The CNBC report details that Le Maire has been an “outspoken opponent of libra since Facebook unveiled the project in June. In addition to concerns the cryptocurrency could undermine the sovereignty of other nations’ currencies, he has highlighted issues with money laundering, terrorism financing and market dominance. Regulators around the world have echoed those fears.”
An attribute of the Sovereignty of the States
The Finance Minister also defended the notion that Facebook’s proposed stablecoin project was “an attribute of the sovereignty of the States” and because of that it should remain “in the hands of the States and not of the private companies which answer to private interests.”
Whilst Libra developers and staffers of the payments network stated in June that the ecosystem would be up and running in the first half of 2019, it remains to be seen if they get the permits and proper licenses to guarantee full compliance and a fully-regulated assets that users can trust.
By Andres Chavez
