Regulators must make sure Facebook lives up to Libra’s structure, says Wall Street veteran

Michael Casey, CEO of Streambed Media and former Wall Street Journal reporter, with his expertise in covering global finance and economic affairs, spoke about Facebook’s Libra and why it incurred a negative response from the community upon its launch.

Casey said that Facebook’s Libra project was hugely anticipated and that he was “pleasantly surprised at the lengths they had gone” to ring-fence the Libra project from Facebook. Casey, who had criticized the social media giant over its impact on the society, noted that he felt nervous about the role Libra is going to play in this. He added,

“But, I feel like the structure of it is actually, potentially, if they could live up to it, [lots of ‘Ifs’ and caveats in there], quite potentially constructive to both cryptocurrencies, but just more importantly because one thing that really matters is financial inclusion and reducing global friction in money flow. So I was somewhat pleasantly surprised but I’m inherently cautious given, again, the genesis that this is come from.”

The community feels that the project might have great potential but according to Casey, the negative reaction Libra received was inevitable. The company’s algorithm has potentially undermined America’s democracy and its history of data breaches has added to the negativity around the project. However, that is not the biggest problem faced by the media giant.

“I think the biggest problem that they face is that… the regulators do not understand the nuances here and I would want to see a regulatory effort made around holding Facebook to its word that it lives up to the structure of Libra and the spirit of it as being this external open source model and that whatever fears, rightly or wrongly exist around Facebook’s capacity to extract data from users, doesn’t come to bare because of that structure.”