Facebook’s Libra Could be Changing Direction to Save Itself

• Facebook has been processing various ways to move the Libra forward lately.
• Rumors claim that the social media giant will incorporate USD and EUR payments into Calibra.
• Australia says it’s ready to receive and regulate Libra, although they still have doubts about its adoption.

Ever since Facebook presented its “Libra” cryptocurrency project aiming to take on the established banking system, governments and representatives of the traditional monetary status quo have bashed it. The ECB (European Central Bank) called the people to ignore it because it is “beguiling but treacherous”, and soon, cracks in the coalition started to form. PayPal abandoned ship just a few months after it joined the effort, and soon, Visa, Mastercard, eBay, Stripe, and Mercado Pago have all decided to withdraw from the association.

It quickly became clear for Facebook that if they wanted Libra to go anywhere, they would have to play by the system’s rulebook, and not their own this time. Thus, the social media giant had to choose between scrapping the project or to fundamentally change its nature. As “The Information” reports now, the way to go will be by including government-backed currencies like the USD and the EUR in its new platform. Apparently, the Libra crypto coin will still be launched, but users will have the option to just use their “normal” currencies. So the whole Calibra thing will essentially turn into an almost regular electronics payment system, rather than a revolutionary project that could take apart the existing monetary system.

As for when we’ll see the Calibra platform launched, the last time Facebook estimated the date it was placed in June 2020, but unconfirmed sources now say it will not become publicly available before October this year. The new projected way for Libra's operation wants the cryptocurrency aspect to be stripped out of its core and placed aside, serving like an optional thingy that a small number of people would experiment with. Of course, Facebook still has faith in its “stablecoin”, otherwise they would rather stop here than make compromises to keep the project alive.

In parallel news, the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) has announced that it’s ready to regulate new payment technologies like Facebook’s Libra. The RBA was very critical of Libra in the past, but they received an “early version” of the cryptocurrency to test it out before it becomes mainstream, so they may have realized a new opportunity. Still, they stated that even if Libra becomes widely available, people in the country may reject it for bringing almost nothing new on the sector of payment convenience and efficiency.