Why Restarting Libra Won’t Work—and What We Should Do Instead

Given the polarity flip of the US Government towards Bitcoin and more generally Digital Assets, many have been suggesting to me and others that we should restart the Libra project now that it has a chance.

While I agree it would be able to move forward now without it being killed like last time we tried it, my conviction—after digesting all the learnings from this epic odyssey—is that it was the wrong design, and it’s even less adequate now that four years have passed since its demise. I’ll try to unpack and break down why below, and more importantly, the way forward to realize Libra’s vision.

First things first—what problem are we trying to solve? My answer is: moving money globally on the internet like any other content type. But even further, it’s making money move seamlessly all the way from/to where people and business use it. It must be real-time, 24/7, and cheap.

I started thinking about Libra in late 2017. The global payments landscape was very different then. For the most part, domestic real-time payment systems weren’t a thing. RTP, SEPA Instant and UPI were just getting off the ground, PIX (arguably the best) launched in 2020, FedNow didn’t exist. So, at the time, we had to imagine a circular economy using a new digital unit of account—a well-designed stablecoin—which combined with the distribution of the 28 initial Libra Association founding members and decent on/off ramps would’ve gotten the job done.

We anticipated that many nations would oppose a dollar-only stablecoin, led by a US-centric consortium, so we—naively—started with a reserve design that predominantly indexed on the USD but included other significant currencies. That didn’t work. And I’ll come back to why this matters further down.

Now, seven years after Libra was initially designed, payments have both changed a lot in some ways, and not at all in many others. It’s a tale of two cities. On the one hand, domestic payment networks now settle transactions in real-time at a very low cost or for free; on the other hand, interoperability between these networks remains shockingly antiquated and stuck in the past. Trillions of dollars get moved daily between countries and currencies, either taking 3-5 days to settle at a high-cost through the correspondent banking system, or through large banks leveraging their own global liquidity to move value on behalf of their clients. It’s a bit like being able to use WhatsApp or iMessage only in your country, but if you want to message someone in a neighboring country, you must fax them.

Meanwhile, USD stablecoins have gained in popularity outside of DeFi. Mostly across three use cases: B2B payments, enterprise global treasury management, and providing a USD-denominated balance to people around the world who can’t have the real thing —aka as a US bank account—and live in countries with bad, hyper-inflated currencies.

So in 2025, we have better domestic payment systems, solutions to a few use cases with stablecoins moving on a garden variety of insufficiently decentralized blockchains and L2s, but we still can’t move all the money in the world like any other content type in a standardized way on the internet.

A revived Libra isn’t the solution, though. Most people and businesses worldwide want to use their country’s currency in which all their goods and services are denominated, and their governments also want that very badly. A massive, fully-centralized, privately-operated stablecoin substituting itself to a sovereign currency as the main unit of account of the US, Europe, Brazil, India, or any major nation, would instantly—and easily—be shut down, at least regionally. This design is both not desirable and too fragile.

The only way we can collectively solve for open, cheap, global, 24/7 global money movement is to build on Bitcoin, because it is truly the only settlement asset and network that's sufficiently neutral and decentralized to be fit for this mission. Hyper-optimized Bitcoin, that is —via payment L2s—as the standardized open settlement network, a bit like TCP/IP packets for value, and in the same way, keep it in the background for users. Then, use it to interoperate real-time domestic payment systems with one another, enable banks and wallets to be participants on the network so money can flow from/to where it’s needed, and add support for stablecoins on the same network, so they can play their role to extend the dollar’s reach and influence where appropriate. Ideally, also using a human-readable standard so people and businesses can seamlessly move value just like sending an email.

These learnings informed what we’re building at Lightspark, and we won’t be able to do it alone. This is why we’re open-sourcing many of the capabilities and technologies we’re building along the way and contributing back to existing projects.

If you want to fulfill Libra’s ambitious and important mission, join forces with us, or use our open-source contributions to help move things forward. An open, low-cost, 24/7, real-time, global standard money network, something I like to call the Open Money Grid, is within reach now.

If you’re a digital bank, or wallet, connect to the Grid, issue Universal Money Addresses to your customers, if you’re a developer, in a short few weeks, you’ll be able to build money apps on Bitcoin like never before on Spark, a brand new payment-focused Bitcoin L2 we’re so excited to roll out. If you’re a stablecoin issuer, and want to truly crack mainstream payments use cases and generate revenue from transactions instead of worrying about gas fees, or how much of your reserve yield revenue is going to be left once you start to pay interests to your users, Spark is also the answer for you.

The time is indeed now. Let’s build the right thing together.