The Facebook-led digital currency project Libra has announced a drastic downgrading of the scope of its initial vision, scrapping several elements of the project in an attempt to placate global regulators.
On Thursday, the 22-strong Libra Association, which lost a flurry of high-profile members last year over concerns that the initiative might hurt monetary stability or facilitate money-laundering, unveiled a substantially diminished “Libra 2.0”, designed to appease wary regulators. It added that it was still aiming to launch by the end of 2020.
Among the concessions made to regulators was the abandonment — initially at least — of its key proposal to create a synthetic coin backed by a basket of currencies. Instead, the association said it would offer a set of digital versions of single currencies, such as a Libra dollar or a Libra euro, that would be fully backed one to one by cash or cash equivalents, plus support from a capital buffer.