The European Central Bank (ECB) wants regulators to kick into a higher gear when it comes to developing rules for big tech firms moving into finance, such as Facebook and its Libra cryptocurrency project.

According to a report from Bloomberg, ECB Executive Board member Benoit Coeure said in France on Sunday:

“It’s out of the question to allow them to develop in a regulatory void for their financial service activities, because it’s just too dangerous. We have to move more quickly than we’ve been able to do up until now.”

Such projects are a “useful wake-up call for regulators and public authorities,” said Coeure, since they pose a number of questions and may get regulators to improve the way they work.

The news comes as the latest in a string of reports indicating that global watchdogs are worried that the Libra project, in combination with Facebook’s billions of users, could pose a threat to national fiat currencies such as the dollar. There are additional concerns about Libra’s possible use in money laundering if not governed correctly

Some U.S. lawmakers are even seeking a freeze on development of the cryptocurrency, and different government agencies will hold hearings this month to discuss the project.

Elsewhere, watchdogs in nations such as France, Japan, Singapore have expressed some concern over Libra and said more needs to be known about the project.

French finance minister Bruno Le Maire has previously said that “it is out of question’’ that Libra be allowed “become a sovereign currency. It can’t and it must not happen.”

On Sunday, Coeure argued that cryptocurrency development brings to light weaknesses in current regulations, as well as a failure of the banking system to adopt new technology, Bloomberg wrote.

ECB building via Shutterstock

The Singaporean government’s taxation agency is proposing to remove goods and services tax (GST) from cryptocurrency transactions that function or are aimed to function as a medium of exchange.

The Inland Revenue Authority of Singapore (IRAS) published last Friday an e-Tax draft guide for treatment on what it calls the “Digital Payment Tokens,” seeking to exempt any entity dealing with such digital assets from GST liabilities.

If the draft guide passes into legislation, starting from Jan. 1, 2020, the following changes will take effect to “better reflect the characteristics of digital payment tokens:”

(i) The use of digital payment tokens as payment for goods or services will not give rise to a supply of those tokens

(ii) The exchange of digital payment tokens for fiat currency or other digital payment tokens will be exempt from GST.

The IRAS said the e-Tax guide is still in its draft form and that the Ministry of Finance will be holding a public consultation from now until July 26 on the “legislative amendments for digital payment tokens.”

The draft guide also sets out detailed parameters on how digital payment tokens are defined, which should have all of the listed characteristics below:

a) It is expressed as a unit

b) It is fungible

c) It is not denominated in any currency, and is not pegged by its issuer to any currency

d) It can be transferred, stored or traded electronically

e) It is, or is intended to be, a medium of exchange accepted by the public, or a section of the public, without any substantial restrictions on its use as consideration.

“Examples of digital payment tokens are Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, Dash, Monero, Ripple and Zcash,” the IRAS added in the proposal.

Notably, the agency specified that stablecoins, a type of cryptocurrency designed to have a value pegged to a fiat currency, may not qualify to be GST exempt.

“Any digital token that is denominated in any fiat currency or with a value pegged to any fiat currency will not qualify as a digital payment token,” the IRAS said in the draft. “For example, a digital token pegged to US dollars will not qualify as a digital payment token.”

IRAS said the effort to end GST liabilities on cryptocurrencies follows worldwide development and growth in the space that has led various jurisdictions to have reviewed their stance. “Similarly, IRAS has reviewed its GST position to keep up to date with these developments,” the agency said.

Under the current framework, the supply of digital payment tokens is still seen as a taxable supply of services.

“Therefore, the sale, issue or transfer of such tokens for consideration by a GST-registered business is subject to GST. When the tokens are used as payment for the purchase of goods or services, a barter trade resulting in two separate supplies arises — a taxable supply of the tokens and a supply of the goods or services,” the IRAS said in the draft.

In October 2017, lawmakers in Australia passed a piece of legislation to end what was called double taxation, exempting the liability for paying goods and services tax (GST) on cryptocurrency purchases.

Singapore image via Shutterstock

If you ever wanted to quantify the strength of a trend based on its volume levels – as well as the degree of buying and selling pressure – there’s a handy indicator that can help you do the job.

The Chaikin Money Flow (CMF) is an indicator, created by Marc Chaikin, that’s used to analyze Money Flow Volume over a specific “lookback” period of time, usually 20 or 21 days.

The concept of Money Flow Volume (MVF) is a variable used in the calculations by Chaikin and measures the buying and selling pressure of an asset over a single period. In order to calculate money flow, one must first determine the Money Flow Multiplier used in the overall equation.

To calculate the Money Flow Multiplier for a period:

[(Close  – Low) – (High – Close)] /(High – Low) = Money Flow Multiplier

Money Flow is defined by multiplying the Multiplier with the volume for the current period:

Money Flow Multiplier x Volume for the Period = Money Flow Volume

Thankfully, you don’t need to do the equation every single time, as charting websites like TradingView can do it for you.

The Chaikin Money Flow

The CMF’s value fluctuates between 1 and -1, with the basic interpretation that when the CMF is closer to 1, buying pressure is higher, while, conversely, when below 0 and closer toward -1, selling pressure is higher.

What to watch for

The chart above shows that from period Jan. 6 to Jan 9. 2019, prices began to retrace after a slight rally occurred the day prior.

But with a triggered sell-off along the $4,000 former support zone, the CMF illustrated a huge pickup in selling pressure and confirming the bearish move as legitimate and extensive.

Indeed, savvy investors could have used the CMF to gauge the swift rejection at the neutral zero-line, conserving 9-10 percent of their investment in the process.

Bear/Bull Cross

A bull or bear cross with the CMF simply means a crossover above or below the neutral zero-line when the indicator begins to move and switch from one zone to the other.

Recent price action shows a dip below 0 as it crossed into negative territory amid a minor sell-off, indicating that selling pressure is greater for that current period and the possibility for dipping lower is increased.

However, the CMF isn’t always perfect and only posts information after a major move has occurred, allowing one to simply confirm its placement in terms of momentum and volatility.

The CMF is best used in conjunction with other indicators like the relative strength index (RSI), stochastic or Chaikin oscillator in order to provide confirmation to your primary reading.

And while it is useful on all time frames, the CMF functions optimally in analyzing longer-term trends.

Weekly chart

Here we see the RSI providing a fairly lackluster reading on Dec. 31 of 31.54 combined with the bearish cross on the CMF as price made no new highs after temporarily attempting to rally higher.

Once the CMF reaches the bottom of the range, selling pressure is at its greatest extent and if no further drawdown is achieved then you may consider prices to be stabilizing at those current levels.

But there are limitations…

The Chaikin Money Flow faces limitation in the aforementioned Money Flow Multiplier as it does not take into account the change in a trading range between periods, meaning any price gaps on the chart won’t be picked up and will fall out of sync until an eventual reset or a reconfiguration of the values.

When combined with other indicators, however, the Chaikin Money Flow can be a useful tool for measuring the buying and selling pressure of a particular asset over a specified timeframe and could save you potential losses in the future when used in conjunction with other noteworthy signals.

Disclosure: The author holds no cryptocurrency at the time of writing.

Waves image via Shutterstock; charts by TradingView

The Takeaway

A handful of cryptocurrency exchanges are rolling out the red carpet for high-frequency traders.

Huobi, based in Singapore, and ErisX, in Chicago, have separately begun offering colocation, in which a client’s server is placed in the same facility or cloud as the exchange’s, officials at each exchange told CoinDesk. This allows those investors to execute trades up to a hundred times faster, giving them an edge over the rest of the market.

These exchanges join Gemini, which was one of the first crypto firms to offer colocation at a popular data center in the New York area, and is about to expand the option to include a second site in Chicago.

Notably, none of these exchanges charges for the service, seeing it as a way to differentiate themselves. “It’s our competitive advantage,” said Andrey Grachev, head of Huobi Russia, the exchange’s Moscow client office.

To be sure, such accommodations remain rare in crypto, which historically was dominated by individual traders and only recently began to draw interest from institutional investors such as hedge funds and family offices.

But the exchanges’ moves are a sign that high-frequency trading (HFT), a longtime and controversial practice in traditional financial markets, is slowly entering the crypto sphere. And though “bots” have been present in crypto since the days of Mt. Gox, colocation takes algorithmic trading to a different level.

Eric Wall, former crypto and blockchain lead at Cinnober, a financial technology company acquired by Nasdaq, told CoinDesk:

“It’s big business, everyone I’ve been speaking to that runs an exchange mentioned being approached by Wall Street types with these kinds of requests.”

Most crypto exchanges are not ready to satisfy this demand, Wall said. These are “very new concepts to many retail-focused exchanges with no experience of the traditional world, it seems.”

800K trades a day

In the six months since Huobi opened its Russia office, around 50 clients have taken advantage of its colocation service by locating their servers in the same cloud and using the same domain name service (DNS) as the exchange, according to Grachev.

The option allows these clients to make trades 70 to 100 times faster than other users, he said. “One of our clients makes about 800,000 trades a day, and there are more and more such clients.”

Unlike many crypto exchanges that use cloud-based servers, ErisX has a hardware matching engine, located in the Equinix data center in Secaucus, New Jersey, said Matthew Trudeau, the exchange’s chief strategy officer.

The same facility houses the matching engines of a range of major traditional exchanges, brokers and trading firms, Trudeau told CoinDesk, so traders that colocated servers in the data center can connect to ErisX’s matching engine there. (The firm launched spot trading in several cryptocurrencies in April and recently obtained regulatory approval for futures.)

Gemini, founded in 2014 by Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, also houses its primary trading platform at Equinix and offers colocation there. The exchange plans to offer another colocation option soon in Equinix’s Chicago data center, where multiple stock exchanges — and their HFT customers — keep their hardware, according to Gemini’s website.

In a statement, Gemini’s managing director of operations Jeanine Hightower-Sellitto said the exchange “offers a variety of connectivity options to suit our customers’ needs. Each option is available to all of our customers free of charge.”

Coinbase, the leading U.S. crypto exchange, almost entered the fray, but this year closed down its Chicago division that had been working on services for high-frequency traders, including colocation. At the time, the exchange cited its prioritization of other institutional services.

The company declined to comment for this article. (Gemini, which just opened a Chicago office, hired some of Coinbase’s former employees there.)

Controversial practice

All of this invites the question of whether HFT, given its history on Wall Street, could exacerbate problems in the opaque and volatile crypto markets.

As depicted in Michael Lewis’s book Flash Boys, algorithmic stock traders placed their servers in the physical vicinity of exchanges’ to execute trades faster than other investors and make profits on arbitrage between markets in fractions of a second.

The issue with HFT, as explained by Lewis, is that in a market where some players can perform trades hundreds of times faster than ordinary users, they get an unfair advantage and leave ordinary, non-algorithmic traders with inferior price options.

Another problem with HFT, according to a 2011 report by the International Organization of Securities Commissions (IOSCO), is that it can dramatically increase volatility in markets.

In particular, it contributed to the so-called Flash Crash on May 6, 2010, when the prices of many U.S. securities fell and recovered dramatically in minutes, exposing ordinary traders to a higher risk which they couldn’t manage as quickly as HFTs.

High-speed trading has led to other technical glitches that cost companies hundreds of millions of dollars, the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago wrote in 2012, noting that “some high-speed trading firms have equity ownership stakes in certain exchanges.”

Maturing market

However, ErisX’s Trudeau (who, it should be noted, was one of the early employees of stock exchange IEX, the heroes of Flash Boys) argued that high-frequency arbitrage and automated trading, in general, can benefit markets.

They are helping to narrow the price spread between different exchanges over time and make markets more efficient – including the crypto market, Trudeau said, explaining:

“This phenomenon has occurred in other asset classes as trading has become more electronic and more automated. Market makers and arbitrageurs are able to trade more efficiently, which improves price formation, price discovery and liquidity. Arbitrage opportunities may become fewer and more fleeting, which is a sign of a more efficient and maturing market.”

It’s important, however, to check if the exchanges and high-frequency traders strike deals with preferential terms which are not disclosed to the market, he noted.

As for ErisX, it “offers transparent, standardized pricing and connectivity options for our customers. All customs are offered the same terms of access and fees,” Trudeau said.

For its part, Huobi tries to make sure all users “compete on a level playing field,” said the exchange’s head of global sales and institutional business, Lester Li.

Li told CoinDesk:

“Our users know that we monitor for any abusive trading activity. We also continually remind users that there will always be risks when you trade, that is why we strongly recommend users to trade within their means and be mindful of the risks involved.”

Protecting retail

Still, other exchanges contacted by CoinDesk made a point of saying they don’t do anything special for algo traders.

A smaller exchange tailored for institutional clients, LGO Markets, which launched earlier this year, took the opposite approach, deliberately slowing the trading process for everyone, according to CEO Hugo Renaudin.

Before getting matched, the orders are gathered into batches and the hash of every batch gets recorded in the bitcoin blockchain — each batch takes around 500 milliseconds to form, so this serves as a “speed bump” for trades, Renaudin said. As a result, “every trader has the same feedback on the activity of the platform.”

Taking a similar stance, Kraken’s vice president of engineering, Steve Hunt, told CoinDesk the exchange doesn’t do anything differently for HFT customers.

“We want all customers regardless of size or scale to have equal access to our marketplace,” Hunt said.

Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange, is not considering offering colocation, account manager Anatoly Kondyakov told attendees of a recent “elite investor” meetup in Moscow. He gave two reasons.

First, “we’re trying to protect retail customers,” Kondyakov said, answering a question from the audience. Second, colocation means an official presence in a particular jurisdiction, he said, which Binance is not willing to do at the moment. (Binance is known for its deft regulatory arbitrage.)

Too soon?

Still, others said the crypto market hasn’t caught up with the traditional financial world to the point where offering colocation services to HFT firms would make much sense.

“Currently, the crypto market structure is still developing. HFT, in the context of equity and FX markets, does not really exist,” said Wilfred Daye, head of financial markets at San Francisco-based exchange OKCoin.

Traders coming into crypto from the traditional markets do ask for colocation, he said, but “the ask is one-off, not a popular ask in crypto,” so OKCoin doesn’t offer this service.

David Weisberger, сo-founder and CEO of market data platform Coinroutes, has another reason to be skeptical about HFT in crypto: this market is so much more dispersed and volatile that what works with stocks just won’t with bitcoin.

The concept of HFT front-running is irrelevant in crypto, Weisberger said, where the prices vary between different exchanges much more than in traditional markets:

“In futures or equities, with relatively large minimum quote variations, the bid offer spread is often stable with a lot of bids and offers at the same price. In that circumstance the fastest gets to be at the front of the queue whenever the price changes. Those orders at the front of the queue are profitable, while the ones at the back are not. In crypto, the tick size (price variation) is so small, it is easy to be ‘first’ by paying a slightly higher amount, so no need for incredible speed.”

Plus, crypto exchanges are so scattered around the world that there is no point in “being colocated to one exchange and still having to wait seconds for Binance to update,” Weisberger added.

The reason there is demand for colocation at crypto exchanges, he concluded, is simply human nature:

“People always fight the last war. People do what they are used to.”

Image via Shutterstock

Steven Sprague is one of the principal industry evangelists for the application of trusted computing technology. Steven served as president and CEO of Wave Systems Corp. for 14 years before transitioning to the board of directors.

Recently, Facebook launched Libra with the stated goal of “transforming the global economy.”

It’s a lofty aim. However, after a review of the technical documentation describing the Libra protocol and its planned ecosystem, I believe the company left out the foundational components of user security.

It is our job as technical leaders to provide a vision and an architecture for integrating real protections and evidence into the consumer experience; to deliver a new model for provable compliance that reduces cost and sets the stage for global automation.

The “Internet of Money” must support a primary goal of ensuring all transactions on the Libra network are purposeful, intended and compliant. I envision a future where the quality of recorded intent for an online transaction is just as strong, if not stronger, than the quality of physical in-store purchases.

The Internet of Money should be cross-border, open and global. It should carry transactions from everyone and everything. In order for this to be possible, groups or communities will need to be formed around the compliance and controls required. Proof that these controls were in place should be part of every instruction sent to a chain and forever be recorded by the math of the blockchain. Those who need to know can then be provided the evidence for proof of compliance.

The new model for consumer compliance should operate like a doctor’s note does today. A trusted third party parses my child’s real-time health data and provides a compliance result to the school, resulting in my child having an excused absence for being sick. If schools used the same model of compliance that the internet does, they would have direct real-time access to childrens’ medical data and use AI to decide if your child should stay home or not. The decentralized model of permission slips enables a global market to flourish with privacy built in.

I believe the permission slip on the blockchain is a hash of the manifest of controls executed before an instruction is sent to the chain. The manifest is a Merkle tree of controls, assuring every step is provable with just the evidence of the hash. The power of the Merkle tree reduces the evidence to just a few bytes, easily packaged within a transaction.

The manifest can then be securely shared to the receiving party or to those who need to know the full evidence of required controls.

Global money, group-based compliance

Whether or not Libra succeeds in its mission to deliver the “Internet of Money,” cryptocurrency represents the ability to have borderless money that can rely on real-time transaction-based compliance.

There may ultimately be only a few global currencies with immutable transactions, however, there will be an infinite number of groups built around compliance at differing levels, establishing global cross-border commercial virtual networks built to conduct secure and provable business in a specific market.

The privacy and auditability of commercial networks are important, and the “Internet of Money” needs to provide an open platform that can meet everyone’s needs. The use of a smart instruction to provide provable evidence of identity, compliance, and controls, offers a flexible and scalable model.

The evidence of compliance can be securely shared.

Decentralized controls are in the hands of the owner of the private key, offering multiple isolated services to meet the market and regulatory requirements. By separating the identity controls and compliance, it provides the marketplace with the choice and competition needed to drive innovations. The cornerstone is then laid for automation and AI-based systems to provide monitoring and evidence-based compliance with reduced need for any real personal identifiable information or data leakage.

Governments and regulators will still maintain the access they need to enforce the rules and reporting requirements in place.

Who really controls your keys?

In cryptocurrency, we can sometimes lose our way. In an attempt to make services easier to use, we put the user’s keys in a server or other centralized storage system to allow for an easier experience.

However, in the spirit of innovation, I believe we have to throw away the old forms of customer protections in order to revolutionize a desperately outdated system.

Storing the keys locally and creating opportunities for any consumer to use multiple devices to backup, recover, and assert their keys, is the first step toward progress.

In Libra’s proposal, what struck me also was the lack of redundancy for the storage of the private key. It is our job to minimize the risks created by the supply chain. In order to maximize user protections, private keys should be stored and used in a manner which minimizes the impact of security subsystem failures.

I believe the consumer will require multiple redundant protections for the private key.

As an example, Rivetz has partnered with Telefonica to develop the C.L.I.P. program which defines and promotes a method of cryptographically combining multiple hardware elements to offer separate supply chains for protections that are used cooperatively to secure the consumer’s private key.

A call for safety

The future is decentralized and the technologies of blockchain will usher in the “Internet of Money.” Secure devices and trustworthy computing will provide users with the protection, compliance, control, privacy and freedom they need for the digital future. Private compliance communities will provide digital evidence on a need to know basis.

As an industry, I hope that we can come together to deliver true consumer protections to every digital citizen. Great security is invisible, and we can deliver a simpler and safer experience for all.

Sprague has published a full-length white paper on Libra and Calibra security. It can be found here.

Keys image via Shutterstock

Noelle Acheson is a veteran of company analysis and a member of CoinDesk’s product team. The opinions expressed in this article are the author’s own.

The following article originally appeared in Institutional Crypto by CoinDesk, a free newsletter for institutional investors interested in cryptoassets, with news and views on crypto infrastructure delivered every Tuesday. Sign up here.

Coming from an organization so tied to the question of identity (whether real or not), it is surprising that Facebook’s Libra coin seems confused about its own.

The organization has chosen to brand Libra “a stable global cryptocurrency,” and the label “cryptocurrency” has been replicated by media around the world. Yet Libra is not a cryptocurrency.

Don’t get me wrong – those of us in the sector appreciate the global attention given to the concept since the announcement.

But in this case the definition matters beyond semantics: it will affect eventual use cases and regulatory treatment. It could also transform how investors view both stablecoins and blockchain-based securities going forward.

What’s in a name?

First, let’s look at why it’s not a cryptocurrency.

While definitions vary, one key characteristic of cryptocurrencies is their resistance to censorship. For this, they need to be “decentralized enough” to prevent any one group from deciding who gets to transact. Libra does not yet fulfill that criteria, and although the Foundation has said it plans to move towards a “more decentralized” system over time, doing so (or not) is entirely in its hands.

Furthermore, the value of a Libra coin is not created by the underlying technology, the market, math or however you choose to understand bitcoin and similar assets. It’s a digital representation of a basket of fiat currencies and other securities.

The only thing Libra coin has in common with cryptocurrencies is that they all move on a blockchain.

So, what is it? On the surface, it’s a “stablecoin,” a token that maintains a stable value via a peg to “real world” assets such as fiat currencies or a commodity (some stablecoins have an algorithmically-determined value mechanism, but they belong in a different discussion). The sector is currently awash with stablecoin projects building solutions for payments and settlements, most of which are not yet live. Of those that have launched, few outside of U.S.$-backed Tether have significant volume, although the market is young and still shifting.

Where Libra differs from its stablecoin peers is in the peg: according to the white paper, it will be backed by “a basket of bank deposits and short-term government securities” (my italics). Notice the use of the term “securities.” An asset backed by securities is, by definition, also a security. Libra is more like an ETF than a fiat-backed stablecoin.

We can try to argue that short-term government debt is more a currency than a security. But even without the telltale use of the word, the regulators’ approach to stablecoins is still up in the air. At the Crypto Evolved conference in New York last month, SEC Deputy Director Elizabeth Baird was asked for her take on stablecoins. Her response was blunt: “I think they’re securities.”

Others have posited that even relatively simple fiat-backed stablecoins could be characterized as swaps or “demand notes,” both of which would be treated as securities. And the SEC’s head of digital assets, Valerie Szczepanik, confirmed at a hearing last week that it does not matter that the stablecoin “does not have an expectation of profits” (with the usual caveat of “facts and circumstances”).

Security payment

Note that this is Libra coin we’re talking about, not the Libra Investment Token which is obviously a security. We’re talking about the token that Facebook hopes will become the de facto payment mechanism for most of the world.

The white paper opens with: “Libra’s mission is to enable a simple global currency and financial infrastructure that empowers billions of people.” Glossing over the unrealistically aspirational qualification of “simple” (really??), can we use a security as a “currency”?

Asset-backed representations of value have been currencies before – think of the dollar and other national currencies back in the days of the gold standard. But they were backed by a commodity that was not controlled by any one entity and did not have an “issuer.” The Libra proposition is very different.

With this, we start to see why the definition is so important. If the Libra token is officially classified as a security, as is likely, then using it in a transaction will involve a “sale” of that security, and a capital gain or loss. Since we’re talking about a stablecoin, the taxable event is unlikely to be significant. But it will be greater than zero, since Libra’s basket value will fluctuate relative to the currency into which Libra coin has to be converted to complete the transaction (because Libra is unlikely to become a “unit of account” in which the value of local goods is denominated).

Sure, software will emerge to smooth the friction and helpfully calculate what we have to officially declare – but the need to do so at all will act as a significant barrier. It’s not only the hassle and cost involved; it’s also the understandable desire of most even law-abiding users to stay off the tax authorities’ radar.

New packaging

What does this mean for crypto investors?

In terms of portfolio allocations, not much. Libra as it is currently structured will not provide competition-beating gains for funds looking for alpha. As its ecosystem matures, it could provide stable returns through lending or collateralization – many funds prize liquidity and stability over high risk and performance. But that’s not going to set the securities world on fire.

The main impact will come not so much from Libra itself, but in the glimpse it offers of where a new asset class could emerge.

The idea of securities as payment mechanisms is innovative and could open up a host of potential use cases. The requisite stable value need not necessarily mean limited upside, as new share issuance as a sort of value-linked dividend (for example) could maintain a peg while providing the holder with a return. Instead of the share price going up, an algorithm would issue you more of them, and destroy some if the value went down. Your wealth would fluctuate, while the price of the share remains stable.

The fiscal friction from using a security as payment would not be an issue for institutions, since they generally have back offices well versed in handling this.

Another intriguing thread to pull on is the idea of securities backed by a basket of currencies and government debt. We could see the emergence of custom-made securities that hedge the currency risk of the issuer. Currency hedges are a major concern for both corporates and investors – imagine a debt instrument that packages those complex equations into a stable yield, or into a pre-hedged token for use in either capital markets or supply chain transactions.

Expect the unexpected

Financial innovation did not start when blockchain technology got a new lease of life through connected networks and decentralized consensus. Markets have been furiously evolving since there were markets, often in unexpected ways with unintended consequences.

For all its features and faults, Libra represents a significant step forward in this process. Its stated aim of extending financial inclusion and reducing payment friction is one that has consumed entrepreneurial minds for decades, and while this may not be the solution the world is waiting for, it’s at least pushing the conversation forward in constructive ways.

However, when it comes to technology of any type, few inventions end up being used for their original intent. Libra is unlikely to be any different. In combining elements of distributed ledger technology, economic philosophy and savvy marketing, the initiative will end up boosting awareness, adoption and development of cryptocurrencies and security tokens more broadly. Just not in the way the designers originally anticipated.

Libra image via jakkapant turasen / Shutterstock.com