Vitalik Buterin: Libra is a call to action for governments
The Facebook Libra cryptocurrency project, which has not yet seen the light, already has many enemies ready to strangle it in the cradle. Last week, French Finance Minister Bruno Le Mayor announced that he was going to prevent the development of Libra, as it threatens the monetary sovereignty of the government. Immediately after the announcement of France, Germany followed suit.
Vitalik Buterin, programmer and co-founder of Ethereum (ETH) also shared his thoughts on Libra in an interview with Globes. When asked about what he thinks about the ongoing disputes over Libra, Buterin replied that the current structure of the cryptocurrency project looks rather dubious in terms of confidentiality, as the company does not have means for information protection of clients.
The current working model of Libra suggests that its customers will store their currencies in a digital wallet, which is bad not only in terms of confidentiality, but also because this method is no different from existing traditional financial systems. Buterin believes this could be a big problem for Libra.
“In such a situation, it is always possible that some company creates a wallet that does not perform such a process [of protecting customer information], and people will appear who will use it to launder money.”
However, Buterin made it clear that, since the Libra project has not yet been launched, the developers have time to change something before the official release of the cryptocurrency. Buterin also called Libra “a call to action for governments,” as countries like China took steps to speed up their national CBDC program when Facebook announced the development of stablecoin.
In my opinion, projects like Libra are a call to action for governments that now understand that if they do not revise the technology of their national currencies, they will face competition. Therefore, now we see a great interest in the creation of sovereign digital currencies.
