Facebook Unveils Its Native Cryptocurrency Libra In A Bid To Transform Global Finance

After months of speculation, the social media giant has finally decided to unveil its native cryptocurrency Libra through a whitepaper released today morning, June 18. In the official announcement, Facebook says that “Libra is a simple global currency and financial infrastructure that empowers billions of people”.

Facebook says that its mission to make money transfer across the globe extremely easy without compromising on the necessary security parameters. The Libra cryptocurrency is built on a completely secure, scalable, and a reliable blockchain network called the Libra Blockchain.

To give the Libra currency intrinsic value, it will be backed by a reserve of assets that will be governed by the Libra Association. The Libra Association is a consortium of members of the Libra ecosystem which be acting as validators or nodes of the Libra Blockchain network. This is an attempt by the company to maintain decentralization of the Libra Blockchain.

Facebook has already announced a few “founding members” of the Libra blockchain coming from different industry sectors. Some of the big names include Visa, MasterCard, PayPal, Coinbase, Uber Technologies, Lyft, Andreessen Horowitz, etc.

According to reports, Facebook has unveiled one more cryptocurrency in addition to the Libra called as the “Libra investment token”. The investment token will be more of a security and won’t available to the normal public. It will be available only to the members of the Libra Association consortium.

The good thing is that the software for the Libra Blockchain is completely open-source. Thus, any individual developer or even organizations can build their apps for financial services while connecting billions of people across the globe.

In the whitepaper, Facebook wrote: “To enable the Libra ecosystem to achieve this vision over time, the blockchain has been built from the ground up to prioritize scalability, security, efficiency in storage and throughput, and future adaptability”.

The Libra Blockchain network is developed using the “Move” programming language using the Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) consensus approach. The “Move” programming language allows developers to implement transaction logic and smart contracts on the Libra Blockchain network.

Facebook says: “Move is designed with safety and security as the highest priorities. Move takes insights from security incidents that have happened with smart contracts to date and creates a language that makes it inherently easier to write code that fulfills the author’s intent, thereby lessening the risk of unintended bugs or security incidents”.

We all know that Facebook’s reputation in providing data privacy is not so well. Taking care of this matter, it has announced its new subsidiary called Calibra that will be entirely responsible for all the crypto dealings. Besides, it will make sure that the users’ privacy never mingles their Facebook data with Libra payments. Besides, the users’ real identity won’t be tied to the publicly visible transactions.

Calibra will also act a digital wallet where users can store and exchange their Libra tokens. The Libra Association will also be responsible for governing this application. Moreover, the Founding members of the Libra Association will also interest on the money that users cash-in that will be held in the reserve to keep the value of Libra stable.

Facebook VP of blockchain David Marcus also explains how the Libra currency is can also be tied to the company main revenue source of advertisements. Marcus said: “if more commerce happens, then more small business will sell more on and off platform, and they’ll want to buy more ads on the platform so it will be good for our ads business.”

Facebook has announced that the full-fledged launch of the Libra Blockchain network will happen in the first-half of 2020.