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Facebook shares rose in premarket trading after the tech giant unveiled its part in a new digital currency Libra. Facebook’s stock climbed 2.09% in premarket trading from Monday’s close of $192.96 a share.
As we all know, today Facebook released the whitepaper for their Libra project on libra.org, which is the official webpage for the social networks native cryptocurrency. They are coming out with a bold statement to bank the unbanked. Of course, it reflected on a Facebook (FB) stock as well that rose 2.09% to $192,96.
Some analysts believe that Facebook’s new cryptocurrency initiative could help expand the company’s growth prospects over the coming years. SunTrust analyst Youssef Squali says that with a launch for Libra anticipated in 2020, Facebook intends to become a leading online transactional platform. SunTrust maintains its Buy rating and price target of $215 per share.
Even though some were saying the opposite, Craig-Hallum analyst Brad Berning thinks that a Facebook cryptocurrency could be a positive for PayPal since it could drive higher adoption of Braintree merchant acceptance and the Facebook marketplace. Paypal stock closed up 1% on $118.34.
Binance’s in-depth review says that the Libra project has a chance at becoming the first “everyday” implementation of the ideology and theory behind the Special Drawing Rights (SDR) and other IMF / World Bank initiatives, manifested as a cryptocurrency targeting mass adoption.
For the long term, they predict that what will happen is “un-dollarization of the world” aka introducing a new unit of account for global trade. They wrote:
“If Libra were to be extremely used across the globe, this could (tentatively) lead to the creation of a new standard for global trade. “This global digit” can be seen as a functionable and tradable version of the SDR, proposed by the IMF.
However, Libra is currently more restrictive as one of the constituents but its governance will be more decentralized. However this would result in a shift in monetary economics from public officials to private corporations which could ultimately hinder consumer rights and lead to new monopolistic environments in the global export/import industry.”
They are, however, warning that there are still a number of unanswered questions like which financial institutions will partake in this consortium, details on the staking rewards and costs, ways of Facebook utilizing this project in tandem with its Internet.org initiative to allow access to the Libra network without internet access etc.
Some analysts are arguing that Libra isn’t as decentralized as they seem to claim:
It's remarkable how dishonest the Facebook Libra technical documents are. They repeatedly describe Libra as decentralized, when it obviously isn't.
Reminds me of how often academics have lied to my clients, claiming their trusted consensus solutions are trustless/decentralized. https://t.co/UIGIBRgCXS
— Peter Todd/mempoolfullrbf=1 (@peterktodd) June 18, 2019
However, the truth is that Libra will bring more adoption and awareness to crypto space with the 2.4B existing users. Probably investors will hop in to buy some more crypto including Bitcoin whose price fell a bit for around 1% but it still hovers well around $9,186 at the time of writing