Libra Anticipates 100 Members By Launch, Including Financial Partners

The latest Libra coin news are big and show quite a confidence from the Libra Association. As it stands, Libra anticipates around 100 new members (which were initially envisioned in the June announcement) joining the organization – including banking and financial partners.

“We can confirm that the plan is to have up to 100 members,” a Libra Association representative spoke at the formal charter signing in Geneva.

Bertrand Perez, who is known as the chief operating officer and interim manager of the Libra Association, reiterated this position on CNBC and noted that he remains “confident” that the recent departure of Visa, Mastercard and PayPal (among others) won’t throw a spanner into the network’s eventual launch.

For now, the project which is led by Facebook has no banking partners among the 21 founding members, but Libra anticipates that this could change very soon.

“There’s only one Visa, one Mastercard,” Perez said in an interview. “I will not tell you that we have the equivalent, but I will tell you that we have reputable companies that are also very active in the financial and banking space.”

The loss of the payments partners may slow the timeline but the project is undeterrred, he also said.

“With such a big project and the vision that we’re having, launching a few quarters later or before makes no real change.”

Libra anticipates big news in the future. The Calibra CEO and Libra Association board member David Marcus concurred with Perez on Twitter late last week as news about his departure broke.

I would caution against reading the fate of Libra into this update. Of course, it’s not great news in the short term, but in a way it’s liberating. Stay tuned for more very soon. Change of this magnitude is hard. You know you’re on to something when so much pressure builds up.

— David Marcus (@davidmarcus) October 11, 2019

Moreover, Libra anticipates that 1,500 firms have expressed interest in joining the project with about 180 meeting the given criteria. As the crypto news show, even fourteen of the original 21 members must agree to each new party that is joining the project.

Meanwhile, good news come from Sweden where the central bank (Riskbank) and its chief Stefan Ingves said that the bank has been exploring the potential issuance of cryptocurrencies as cash use in the country declines dramatically. The proposal from Facebook to create such stablecoin “has been an incredibly important catalytic event.”according to the Riskbank chief.

“Private sector money or public sector money — they are basically identical, and if history gives us any guidance at all then almost all private sector initiatives have collapsed sooner or later,” Riskbank’s Stefan Ingves said.