July 11, 2019
Since the announcement of Facebook's virtual currency Libra, multiple government officials from France and the U.K. have expressed doubts about the currency's security and ethics. The G-7, which includes Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the U.K. and the U.S. are putting together a task force to investigate potential risks posed by Libra and other virtual currencies, according to a report by CNBC.
French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire said he was concerned about Libra becoming a "sovereign currency."
"My determination to make sure that Facebook’s … Libra project does not become a sovereign currency that could compete with the currency of states is … absolute," Le Maire said in a speech to the French Senate Thursday. "Because I will never accept that corporations could become private states."
Bank of England Governor Mark Carney also warned that Libra would need to be "rock solid" security wise from the very beginning.
"It's either successful or it isn't," Carney said in a statement. "If it's successful it becomes systemic, because it would involve a very large number of users. If you’re a systemic payment system … you have to be on all the time, you can’t have teething issues, you can’t have people losing money out of their wallets."
Topics: Bitcoin, Mobile Payments, Region: EMEA, Regulatory Issues
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