Facebook launches Libra coin their private cryptocurrency. All you need to know.

Libra, a new private cryptocurrency being launched by Facebook, could launch as soon as January but in a limited format, according to a report from The Financial Times, which cited sources familiar with the matter. The Libra Association, which has 27 members including Facebook, was planning to launch digital versions of many currencies. But now it is reportedly only planning to launch a single coin libra backed by the dollar.

Did you all know that our favorite social media platform Facebook is all set to launch its very own libra cryptocurrency as early as the start of next year? Yes, Mark Zuckerberg and the company are reportedly gearing up for a launch of their own version of the Libra coin with a single cryptocurrency, or you may call it only one dollar-backed coin. This may be an edition that is a slightly downgraded edition of what was in the original plan of the social media giant. The date that Facebook has set for introducing the much-awaited Libra coin could be approaching us as early as January of the coming year. 

Well, what actually is Libra Coin you may ask?

As you may have it, It’s the new cryptocurrency that the social media giant Facebook is going to launch in early January next year, that too with only the limited edition of the Libra cryptocurrency. According to the Western Union report, the point behind it is that you can now send money anywhere in the world with lower fees than if you were to engage, say, With the new cryptocurrency that is more famously known as the Libra, you will be able to shop for your favorite things at your local grocery stores or send money to your friends without any fees. While sharing the details, Facebook has released a whitepaper featuring a smart contracts platform, a new decentralized blockchain including their plans for a lesser volatile cryptocurrency. The cryptocurrency will also let you spend it using third interoperable party wallet apps or Facebook’s very own Calibra Wallet that is going to be included in the Facebook Messenger, Whatsapp, and some of its other apps. It is being said that Facebook has full control over Libra. But there is a governing body the “Libra Association, whose founding members include Andreessen, Horowitz, Visa, and Uber. That is the basic reason why Facebook does not have complete control over the Libra Coin. Each of these members of the Libra Association has an investment of around $10 million at least, by each of the members into the project’s functioning, so, each member has a single vote in its governance to watch over the reserve of the real-world assets that are giving it its value, development of its token and policies regulating the Libra Blockchain. Along with the cryptocurrency Libra, Facebook is also in the process of launching a subsidiary company by the name of Calibra focused on managing the crypto dealings and protecting the users’ privacy by never integrating the Libra Payments into Facebook’s data to avoid any ad targeting. To maintain the stability of Libra, Calibra/Facebook and some other members of the Libra Association will be able to earn interest on the money users cash that is held in reserve. Would you be surprised to know that at first Facebook weighed both an opportunity and the threat related to the cryptocurrency? But later they managed to keep their promise of unsettling the way commodities are currently sold and bought by cutting down the transaction fees that are associated with credit cards. This is in fact much like the ad business by Facebook that manipulates what is bought and sold. You too must have been charged with a 7% rate while transferring money globally. While these cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum were not meant to become a medium of exchange. The volatility rate in their prices made it a bit difficult and complicated for merchants to acknowledge them as payment methods. It seems that it is due to this very reason why cryptocurrencies have missed out on much of their potential to transform financial services. Until and unless there is a set criterion to consider it as replacement of the dollar and the experience of selling and buying is made easy for the audiences. Facebook’s relationship with its 90 million small scale business groups and more than 7 million advertisers was well equipped to handle these issues. As a result of all this hard work, Libra is now expected to become highly proficient with lesser fees, setting it up would now be effortless. Facebook is aiming to make Libra the highly advanced version of Paypal. Quoting on the flexibility of Facebook’s Libra, the social media giant said in its Libra Documentation said that the success of this new venture means that someone who is working abroad will have a faster and simpler way of transferring money to his family back home, even a college student may be able to pay their rent as easily as they pay for a cup of coffee. Currently, people are facing difficulties paying their rents via insecure checks whereas the remittance services have a cost of 7% to transfer money abroad, with charges as high as $50 billion from most users every year.

So how does Facebook’s Libra Coin really work?

So let’s get down to what governs this Libra Coin? How will the payments work and how the users of the wallet will use all of this? To establish trust among its users, Facebook has come up with a governing team, known as Libra Association. Since Facebook thought that people would not trust the project so, it included the pioneers of the association to look over the development of the actual token and the reserves of real-world assets. Each member of the Libra Association spent at least $10 million to becoming a validator node and connecting to the network. Due to all of these procedures, each member has one vote and is entitled to a share in the dividends from the interest that is earned from the Libra reserves where users forfeit fiat currency to obtain Libra. The 28 soon-to-be founding members of the Libra Association include Blockchain: Xapo Holdings Limited, Anchorage, Inc. Bison Trails, and Coinbase. Payments: Mastercard, PayU, Paypal, Stripe, and Visa. Telecommunications: Iliad and Vodafone Group. Multilateral and Nonprofit organizations along with academic institutions: Kiva, Women’s World Banking, Creative Destruction Lab, and Mercy Corps. Technology and Marketplaces: Farfetch, eBay, Facebook/Calibra, Booking Holdings, Lyft, Uber Technologies, Mercado Pago, Inc., and Spotify AB. Venture Capital: Thrive Capital, Breakthrough Initiatives, Andreessen Horowitz, Union Square Ventures, and Ribbit Capital

What are the requirements for joining the Libra Association?

You should have an Internet connection that is 100 Mbps or above. The person who wants to join is required to possess a half rack in the server space. The interested person should be able to reach 20 million people annually and/or should be distinguished as the top industry leader by a group such as the S&P or the Interbrand Global. The person who wants to join the association must own enterprise-grade security along with a permanent site reliability engineer. The person should also have $500 billion in his/her customer balances along with being capable of achieving two of the three thresholds worth $1 billion USD market value. The Libra Association will also be seeking more members for funding. These members will become validator nodes for the blockchain. The association will also conduct fundraising to initiate the ecosystem, creating incentive programs p, and performing social impact grants to reward the early adopters. A representative of each of the member organizations will be responsible to assist in selecting the managing director of the association who would elect a board of 5 to 19 topmost representatives and would be appointing an executive of the team. Each of the members within the Liberation Association will get 1% of the total votes or only a single vote, developing a level of decentralization to protect the ecosystem against any sort of hijacking the Libra for their own individual benefits. While avoiding dominion and sole ownership over the Libra, Facebook shuns away from extra scrutiny from any of the regulators who investigate for privacy breaches. To check for criticism from lawmakers, the Libra Association claims that they look forward to any accountability and public inquiry. They have also stated that they are open to any dialogue with policymakers and regulators and that both parties are on the same page when it comes to the stability of the national currencies. Since it is now a bit clearer about how Libra Coin works and how their underlying associations contribute to the Libra cryptocurrency. Let’s have a detailed look at the Libra Currency.

The Libra Currency:

The Libra coin is symbolized by a Unicode character of three wavy but horizontal lines ? like the $ sign represents the dollar. The price of the Libra will always remain at a constant level therefore it is thought of as a good exchange medium. It is in the hands of the Libra Association to bring out the basket of assets and they can even modify the balance of its composition just in case if you required to set huge price fluctuations in any foreign currency to keep the value of Libra stable. Libra Currency is going to be used in a manner that you will be able to cash some money and reserve it in the form of Libra and spend for purposes such as payments to businesses and online services. It will allow you to trade in your local currency for Libra and vice versa through the wallet apps, including some of the third-party apps such as Facebook’s Calibra wallet and local resellers like local grocery stores.

How does Libra reserve work?

Every time any user cashes in their local currency or dollar for that matter, the money reaches the Libra reserves where Libra coins are imprinted on that specific amount to be transferred to that particular user.

In the case when someone takes out money from the Libra Association, then the coins are burned and the individual (s) gets back the equivalent amount in their native currency. Libra controls its own value to cash out in the same amount of any cashed in the currency over time. Facebook’s teams had a great role in the formation of the Libra Blockchain and the Libra Association. They also created Calibra, which is a regulated subsidiary to guarantee isolation between social and financial data to execute services on the Libra network. Blockchains are mostly either permissionless or permissioned considering the ability to participate as a validator node. When talking in terms of a permissioned blockchain, the access is provided for running a validator node. Where as in the permissionless blockchain, the access is given to someone who meets its technical requirements to run the validator node. So in this way, Libra will commence as a permissioned blockchain. While the main goal of the association is to make the Libra network a permissionless blockchain. In both permissionless and permissioned states, the blockchain would be an open network to everyone, be it a software development company, a developer, business consumer or. Anyone can make products on the top of Libra blockchain. We shall explore some of the great features of the Libra Blockchain that will transform businesses.

The Libra Blockchain:

The Libra Blockchain will prove to be a solid foundation for all our financial services. Depending on the process of investigating most of the current blockchain platforms, the Libra team decided to design a new blockchain platform that is based on the three requirements: It is highly secure to safeguard the financial data and funds. The ability to scale to billions of accounts requiring low latency and a high-capacity storage system along with a high throughput transaction. It has the flexibility to influence all the Libra ecosystem’s governance while powering the future innovations in our financial services. This blockchain was designed to address all these needs to build on the innovative learning approaches from the existing projects. Below are some of the most significant highlights of the Libra Blockchain: This blockchain uses a Consensus Approach based on Byzantine-Fault-Tolerant (BFT. It can repeatedly compute data structures implemented blockchain. It is based on the Move Programming Language to apply the custom transaction logic. The Libra currency implemented the BFT approach discussed earlier to facilitate consensus among all the validator nodes on the transactions that need to be executed and their order of execution. BFT develops a trust in the networks designed to operate properly when some validator nodes, are compromised or failed. So you see here that the goal is to make libra more useful than any other native, local, or national currency, which is accepted in more places with fewer complications.