On October 1st there was a leaked transcript released to the market of a meeting which took place in July where Mark Zuckerberg spoke about Facebook’s new digital currency Libra which is set for release sometime in 2020. Zuckerberg said:
There’s a bunch of other regulatory news this week. I mean, we had a couple of folks in DC on different hearings. [Facebook VP of messaging products] David Marcus talking [about] Libra and the work that we’re doing there. We basically put out this big idea for enabling through our networks, through WhatsApp and Messenger, the ability for people to send money hopefully as easily as you can send a photo or other content across the world to different folks. But we want to work with traditional currencies. So we have a test going in India. We’re working in Mexico and a bunch of other countries to have this rolled out broadly. The hope is to get that rolled out in a lot of places with existing currencies before the end of this year.
The transcripts went on for a while and Zukerberg spoke to his employees about the scale of the project saying “we have this bigger, or at least more exotic, project around Libra, which is to try to stand up a new kind of digital money that can work globally, [and] that will be stable “¦ But it’s a big idea, and it’s a new type of system, especially to be implemented by big companies. We’re not the only ones doing this”.
He then goes on to talk about the regulatory requirements and said:
“Alright, here we’re launching this. here’s a product, your app got updated, now you can start buying Libras and sending them around.” We want to make sure. We get that there are real issues. Finance is a very heavily regulated space. There’s a lot of important issues that need to be dealt with in preventing money laundering, preventing financing of terrorists and people who the different governments say you can’t do business with.
Facebook is a massive deal and one senator at the hearings said it was one of the most important developments of the century. The authorities are very worried that Libra could replace the dollar as the world’s reserve currency despite being reassured that that is not their intention.
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