An insight into the Libra cryptocurrency

By Adam Boudjemaa

In a move that is regarded by most financial analysts as the most ambitious yet in efforts to take cryptocurrency mainstream, Facebook recently unveiled its cryptocurrency, Libra. This move is also seen as one that will reshape finance globally. Additionally, the Libra cryptocurrency will help this social media giant diversify its business from advertising and expand into financial services, a forte which has long been dominated by Wall Street.

Facebook claims:

• Cryptocurrencies are too slow and volatile
• Most people in the world are without banks
• Remittance is expensive, poor people pay the most.

What is?Libra?

Libra is a new cryptocurrency developed by the social media giant, Facebook, and is based on a smart contract blockchain platform. This new virtual currency is meant to live on smartphones and facilitate online commerce and financial transactions. How will Libra work?

Unlike any other existing cryptocurrency, Libra enjoys the backing of some of the world’s most prominent business entities. To get this new Facebook digital currency, all you have to do is to cash in your local currency. Once you have done this, you will get the equivalent of your local currency in Libra. You can use the digital currency to pay for goods and services just as you would with your local currency.

Furthermore, you can seamlessly and securely make payments with Libra across the world. The transactions done with this digital currency cannot be reversed. This move is aimed at curbing fraud, which has almost brought down other online payments platforms such as PayPal. It is expected that when the currency is released in early 2020, the businesses that are Founding Members will be the ones that you can first transact with using this new currency. This is because they are the ones that are currently working on setting up the infrastructure to support payments in Libra.

Move → New Programming language

Move is the programming language of Libra. This language is written in Rust.

Rust advantages:

• Compiled into WebAssembly such as many others blockchain (e.g EOS).
• Becoming very popular
• Cross-platform & Cross-compile (meaning it works on Windows, Linux, and macOS)
• Faster compilation time

“Move” is a new programming language for implementing decentralized finance, transaction logic and “smart contracts”.

On top of that, Move is natively secure by implementing static analysis (find obvious bugs, simple mistakes) and not allowing dynamic dependencies.

Move defines a new Type called Resource (e.g used like String type or Int type).

Who will be in charge of?Libra?

Though the social media giant is the developer of this digital currency, it is not its controller. It’s going to be controlled by the Libra Association. They’re going to be the ones to do all the minting of the crypto using?BFT ConsensusAlgorithm.

How will the Libra BFT Consensus Algorithm work?

The libra blockchain will make use of a state machine replication platform where a client machine transaction request gets assigned to several server processes (Validators). Validator nodes on a network have a Leader node that makes proposals on how to implement the transaction. The validators vote on the proposals, and the winning proposal gets implemented, and the block is replicated across the entire network of nodes.

Libra is expecting to run around 1000 transactions per second, which might be enough for most use cases.

LibraBFT is going to be a permissioned blockchain at first where only those with access will run a validator node, but the eventual ambition is to turn it into a permissionless blockchain, so anyone can develop products across the network. It’s also going to be driven by a new programming language for more security. And most importantly there’s the Calibra.

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