Last summer, Facebook attracted a great deal of attention when they announced that they were planning to launch its own cryptocurrency called libra.
The project, which aims to facilitate easy payments, has since encountered a lot of problems.
Not least, politicians and central banks around the world have opposed Facebook’s plans. This has led to rumors that libra may be launched in a different form than was originally intended.
Economist: Libra can still succeed
One who still believes in the project in its original form is economist John Vaz, who works at Monash University in Australia. In a new interview with Cointelegraph, he says that the libra project, in his opinion, can still succeed.
“Libra is not dead. They are just navigating through this regulatory nightmare”, he says.
John Vaz believes that libra will be one of bitcoin’s biggest competitors, and that Facebook’s creation could well pose a threat to the world’s biggest cryptocurrency.
Does not believe in digital currencies issued by central banks
John Vaz believes libra will succeed partly because the internet giant has access to infrastructure (Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and Whatsapp) where people already exchange goods and services with each other. Partly, because libra is built to be able to handle large amounts of fast payments, which bitcoin is not.
Furthermore, he does not have much fate in the digital currencies that central banks in China and Sweden, among other countries, are currently developing.
“They will be a kind of rearguard action being fought by the central banks because they don’t like cryptocurrencies”, John Vaz says, according to Cointelegraph.
