One of Facebook‘s Co-founders, Chris Hughes, has come out to sound the alarm over the company’s new cryptocurrency – Libra.
Facebook’s unveiling of its digital currency elicited quite a number of reactions from the social media community, including one from Hughes who became a prominent critic when he trended early this year for calling for the breakup of the company.
According to Hughes, Libra will not be a decentralised platform as it’s been purported to be. Instead, it will be a shift of power from central banks around the world towards multinational corporations thereby making Facebook more powerful.
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More Details: The former Facebook founder laid bare his concerns about how Libra could change the way things work and can also end up destabilizing the same emerging economies Facebook claims it is trying to empower.
Perhaps, the most significant comment Hughes made is one that should interest, CBN Governor Godwin Emefiele. According to the Facebook Co-founder;
“If enough people trade out of their local currencies, they could threaten the ability to emerge market governments to control their monetary supply, the local means of exchange, and, in some cases, their ability to impose capital controls.”
The CBN Governor is big on capital control which is basically using government powers to limit the inflow and outflow of forex out of the country. For example, banning access to forex for 41 items. With Libra, importers can simply pay for goods by completing bypassing the CBN.
Note that Hughes happens to be one of the people who believe that Libra is a ticking time bomb waiting to explode. Some think it will be a threat to Bitcoin while others think it would not because Bitcoin has privacy and it is uncensorable.
Besides Facebook’s Libra has a list of partners which includes Mastercard, Visa, PayPal, Stripe, eBay, Uber, Lyft, Spotify, Coinbase, Xapo, Andreessen Horowitz, Union Square Ventures, Mercy Corps, and Women’s World Banking, among others.
