20 IDEAS THAT WILL SHAPE THE 2020s60
FORTUNE.COM // JANUARY 2020
Facebook to cut out pesky
middlemen, avoiding the
fees associated with pay-
ment card–issuing banks
and money transmitters
by routing around them.
Facebook could succeed
where PayPal, Marcus’s old
employer, had capitulated:
realizing the libertarian
dream of a pure, borderless
Internet money, rather than
a market-by-market ap-
proach in which costs and
delays persisted.
By May 2018, Marcus was
leading a blockchain team
full-time. Zuckerberg, in
turn, committed to studying
privacy, decentralized sys-
tems, and cryptography—
foundational principles
of blockchain tech and
cryptocurrencies—as his
2018 New Year’s resolution.
A little over a year later, in
March 2019, Zuckerberg
published a privacy-themed
manifesto in which he de-
scribed his decision to adopt
strong encryption across
many of Facebook’s ser-
vices, including WhatsApp,
Messenger, and Instagram.
Public reaction to the
manifesto focused on the
implications for consum-
ers. But blockchain experts
saw something else: One of
tech’s most powerful leaders
was gravitating toward their
platform. Jeremy Allaire,
CEO of Circle, a crypto-
currency startup, says that
Zuckerberg was recognizing
that blockchain tech “is not
just this digital currency
thing. It’s this building-
block infrastructure for how
information is exchanged.”
It was, in other words, a
platform where Facebook
couldn’t afford not to play.House testimony, Mar-
cus—who heads Calibra,
Facebook’s Libra-focused
digital wallet subsidiary—
exuded sanguinity. “I’m a
‘glass half-full’ kind of guy,”
he says, draping an arm
over the back of his chair
in one of several Calibra
conference rooms named
after Bill Murray flicks.
(This is the What About
Bob? room.) “Everyone is
now talking about digital
currencies around the
world—everyone. And if
it hadn’t come from us,
that timeline—to make
progress in having the
right framework for digital
currencies—would have
taken much longer.”
Indeed, the race for a
global e-currency has only
grown more heated since
Facebook’s face-plant.
Banks, other tech compa-
nies, and national gov-
ernments—most notably,
China’s (see sidebar)—are
readying digital currency
pilots of their own; Libra’s
stumbles might ease the
path for those that come
later, or at least force
regulators to clarify what
they’ll allow. Libra itself,
meanwhile, promises to
course-correct based on the
(often scorching) feedback
it has received.
How will Libra, or any
new currency, satisfy global
regulators? What will it look
like in its final form? Will
Libra be the first globally
viable, price-stable e-cash?
Or will someone else beat
the association to it? To
explore those questions and
others, Fortune canvassed
the financial and digital
worlds for this account.
1.
WHY FACEBOOK
NEEDS LIBRA
I
N THE TECHNOLOGY
sector, there’s a
concept called
“platform risk,” the danger
that another company, or
a newer, trendier techno-
logical innovation, could
kneecap your business by
wooing or coercing your
users away.
If you want to under-
stand what Zuckerberg
might see in Libra, consider
Facebook’s $2 billion 2014
acquisition of Oculus, says
Hunter Horsley, a former
Facebook product manager
who runs Bitwise, a crypto-
currency investing startup.
At the time, neither Oculus
nor VR was anywhere near
mainstream (they still
aren’t). But the possibil-
ity that they could take off
posed an existential threat
to Facebook; if the world
started chatting and “liking”
via VR, Facebook’s domi-
nance would evaporate.
Why not own the leader of
a platform that could be-
come the Next Big Thing?
“Companies historically
always die by not adapting
to new paradigms quickly
enough,” Horsley says.
For Facebook’s executive
team, cryptocurrencies and
blockchains —the database
innovation upon which
those currencies are based —
became unignorable in
2017, when the prices of
Bitcoin and other curren-
cies began an improbable,
months-long climb. The
company’s leaders realized
that cryptocurrency, or
something like it, couldhelp it break into financial
services, an area in which
it has struggled to gain
traction. Everyone at Face-
book had seen how China’s
digital upstarts—Tencent’s
WeChat Pay and Ali-
baba spinout Alipay—had
bypassed the traditional
banking system and be-
come behemoths, weaving
themselves tightly into
people’s daily lives. (In 2018,
Chinese mobile payments
hit $38 trillion in transac-
tions.) Maybe by tapping
into the crypto-zeitgeist,
Facebook could achieve
something similar.
Through 2017, Mor-
gan Beller, then a junior
corporate-development
employee at Facebook,
researched and met with
blockchain startups. She
penned a memo that
helped persuade higher-
ups that Facebook had a
unique opportunity to take
a leading position in the
industry —and that if they
slept on it, they could be
disrupted. Beller ultimately
won over Marcus, one of
Zuckerberg’s top deputies
and one of Bitcoin’s earliest
acolytes in Silicon Valley.
Zuckerberg and Marcus
sat down to chat in depth
about cryptocurrency
around the year-end holi-
days in 2017. Marcus says
they shared frustrations
about the incumbent finan-
cial system: International
payments are an expensive
hassle. Settlements can
take days to clear. Different
systems don’t interoperate.
And the poorer you are, the
more you pay.
A blockchain-inspired
approach might allow