Libra, the stablecoin project strongly desired by Zuckerberg, presented with great pomp not even a year ago with the promise that it would be launched by the first half of 2020, capable of arousing panic in governments around the world and of taking the stage in newspapers in globally, it has completely deflated within a few months and is now a substantially dead currency; not that it amazes me since I was among the first to tell you that pounds was a net that would remain only on paper.
After all the major payment companies (Visa, Mastercard, eBay and PayPal) had withdrawn from the project in October 2019, not even six months after its presentation, yesterday also Vodafone, the latest company of some relevance still present within the libra association, has communicated its intention to withdraw; to report it is cointelegraph with an article published just today.
More precisely, a spokesperson for the telephone giant, contacted by email, replied that:
Vodafone Group has decided to withdraw from the libra association; from the outset, we said that Vodafone's desire is to make a real contribution to expanding financial inclusion. We remain fully committed to this goal but we believe we can make the maximum contribution by concentrating our efforts on M-Pesa. We will continue to monitor the development of the Libra Association and will not rule out the possibility of future cooperation.
M-Pesa, for the uninitiated, is a mobile payment system already fairly popular in Africa and developed by Safaricom, a company with which Vodafone has been collaborating for some time.
Cointelegraph also took steps to seek confirmation directly from Libra, contacting Dante Disparte, head of policy and communications for the Libra Association, which confirmed Vodafone's abandonment; obviously Disparte also hurried to explain that despite the abandonments, the way in which the governance system was designed guarantees a solidity over time, however one must be very gullible to take Disparte's claims for good.
If from the beginning, in fact, there had been huge doubts regarding the fact that libra and facebook were the same thing today there are no more doubts since the social created by Zuckerberg remains the only company of significant size to make part of the project.
We cannot exclude a priori that, in the near future, in the end Facebook will really manage to issue its own stablecoin, it is certain that it now seems impossible that it will succeed in a few months and, above all, even if it manages to overcome the limits of legal nature and the barricades that governments around the world have raised since its presentation, as far as I am concerned, I have serious doubts that this coin could ever gain the trust of users; in other words, I was in Zuckerberg I would already be satisfied that, in the face of the countless scandals involving the company, users do not abandon Facebook en masse.
