Despite mounting skepticism and the lack of support from several leading financial companies, Facebook and 20 other companies have launched the Libra Council, a group designed to support and govern the already controversial Libra cryptocurrency.
In addition to Facebook, which is joining the council via its Calibra subsidiary, the group’s founding members include Uber, Lyft, Spotify, European telecom giant Vodafone and Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreesen Horowitz. The group will be overseen by a five-member board of directors that includes David Marcus, Facebook’s Libra project leader.
The organization held its first meeting in Geneva, and tried to play up a sense of wide business interest in supporting Libra. The association said that 180 “entities” have met the preliminary requirements for group membership and that 1,500 more have expressed interest in joining the group.
Such numbers, if true, would go a ways toward shoring up the public image of Libra, which has been hit by a series of high-level defections and widespread governmental concerns about the status of Libra in the global currency system.
In order to boost support for Libra in the United States, Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg will go to Washington next week to testify about the cryptocurrency before the House Financial Services Committee.
Libra originally planned on having 28 members at the launch of the association, but in less than two weeks, PayPal, eBay, Visa, MasterCard, financial technology startup Stripe and online hotel-reservation company Booking Holdings all dropped their support for the cryptocurrency due to uncertainty about how Libra will be managed and used.
Libra has meet considerable resistance in Europe, in particular, where finance ministers from France and Germany have said they will not support the launch or use of Libra in Europe. A taskforce of financial officials from the G7 group of world economies was also said to be delivering a report to the meeting of the International Monetary Fund this week that will argue that Libra should not be allowed to proceed unless stringent controls and rules over the cryptocurrency are put in place.
