New Libra Fork Could Build A Stablecoin Free Of Corporate Control

The Libra coin news recently are surrounded by a lot of scrutiny, mainly coming from regulators but also from backers such as Mastercard, Visa and as of recently PayPal, which decided to exit the project before its 2020 launch. However, in the meantime, around 30 different blockchain companies and nonprofits plan to initiate a new Libra fork which could lead the Facebook-led crypto project to building its own permissionless version dubbed OpenLibra.

All of this was announced in the ETH news first – and at the Ethereum developer conference Devcon organized by Lucas Geiger (co-founder of the blockchain infrastructure startup Wireline). As he said, OpenLibra will function as a stablecoin pegged to the actual Libra cryptocurrency.

The new Libra fork will apparently come in time as the stablecoin is already scheduled to go live late next year, Geiger said, adding:

“We’re going to fork the code, fork the community and create a new cryptocurrency called OpenLibra,” said Geiger during his presentation at Devcon. “There is no token sale. No equity and no company behind this initiative.”

If you are following the Libra latest news, it is wise to know that OpenLibra’s core team includes representatives from major blockchain projects such as Cosmos, Chainlink, Web3, Democracy Earth and others – as well as non-profit organizations such as the Danish Red Cross.

Geiger also explained that there is a “generous grant” from the Interchain Foundation that will support OpenLibra and the research around it – as well as the personal funds. The Interchain Foundation is a non-profit organization dedicated to supporting the cosmos network development.

“This covers our funding for several months but there are other grants coming in,” Geiger said.

Facebook first unveiled Libra in June and detailed that it is a stablecoin which will be pegged to a basket of fiat currencies as well as government bonds. The new Libra fork and OpenLibra project expects to improve many things, after publishing a permissionless version of the Libra virtual machine on GitHub called “MoveMint” and running atop of the Tendermint blockchain software designed for use on public blockchain platforms such as Cosmos.

“Anything running on Facebook’s Libra, you can just drag and drop to OpenLibra. Finances will work the same. The code will work the same,” Geiger concluded.