tion to regulatory pressure.
On Oct. 8, two senators
sent letters to some of the
biggest companies involved
in Libra—Visa, Mastercard,
and Stripe—asking them
to reconsider their par-
ticipation until everyone
got clearer answers from
Facebook. Those compa-
nies had rooms booked at
the hotel in Geneva where
the founding association
meeting was to take place
on Oct. 14, according to
someone familiar with
the bookings. But they
dropped out of the group
on Oct. 11, also citing the
ugly regulatory climate.
“Given the crazy amount
of pressure they were
under, it was the right
trade-off for their share-
holders and stakeholders,”
Marcus says. If Libra were
to get a regulatory thumbs-
up, however, nothing ispayments through any
(participating) digital wal-
let? Libra. Want to stream
Spotify tunes or hail Uber
and Lyft rides for a dis-
count? Again, Libra.
The biggest potential
impact lies in up-and-
coming economies. Mat-
thew Davie, a Libra board
member and chief strategy
officer for Kiva, a nonprofit
microloan provider in
emerging markets, notes,
“This isn’t about trying to
make your Blue Bottle
coffee a little cheaper.” In
Davie’s vision, anyone
with access to a mobile
phone—that is, increas-
ingly, everyone—can join
the global financial system.
And this would widen an-
other business opportuni-
ty: Facebook’s Calibra unit
could one day offer loans,
a major profit engine in
financial services.
3.
L E SSONS I N
HINDSIGHT
T
HERE WAS no avoid-
ing it: Facebook
had to tell the
public about Libra before
figuring everything out.
“The main criticism that we
get around the rollout has
been, ‘Shouldn’t you have
kept this under wraps for
much longer until you had
more answers to all of the
questions?’ ” Marcus says.
The way Marcus explains
it, his hand was forced. His
team had started meeting
with potential partners—
payment processors, tech
firms, banks, and regula-
tors—and news of the proj-
ect began to leak “profusely”
in the press. Since Face-
book was already seeking
input, he figured it would
be wise to make the newspublic—and perhaps regain
control of the narrative.
Instead, the narrative
spun out of control; privacy
scandals, data breaches,
and disinformation at
Facebook had turned
public sentiment against
it. Marcus says he has just
one regret. “If I had to do
it all over again, I would
probably just focus on what
this thing really is, which is
a new payment system,” he
says, rather than framing
it as a new currency. “That
created more emotions than
were actually warranted.”
Reframing Libra as a
payment system might help
the project recover—espe-
cially given that the depar-
ture of payment processors
from the Libra Association
was what brought the
project to its nadir. PayPal
bailed out on Oct. 4, in
what was, in part, a reac-HARD HEARINGS
Mark Zuckerberg’s seat at
a recent House session on
Libra, where lawmakers
aired objections that could
be tough to overcome.20 IDEAS THAT WILL SHAPE THE 2020s