By
Steve Muchoki
April 18th, 2024
Announced at Ethereum Foundation’s Devcon 5 conference, OpenLibra is described as an “open platform for financial inclusion,” with a telling tagline: “Not run by Facebook.”
When Facebook‘s cryptocurrency Libra started struggling with keeping its co-workers to keep partners on board and all of the institutions happy, an alternative called OpenLibra came to address some of Libra’s potential flaws.
OpenLibra is described as an “open platform for financial inclusion,” with a tagline: “Not run by Facebook” and it was announced at Ethereum Foundation‘s Devcon 5 conference in Osaka, Japan.
Be it as it may, thirty blockchain companies and nonprofit organizations decided to fork the above-mentioned project to launch their own permissionless version – as we already mentioned, dubbed OpenLibra.
First to announce it, was Lucas Geiger, co-founder of blockchain infrastructure startup Wireline and he did it during the Ethereum developer conference Devcon. He explained OpenLibra will function as a “stablecoin pegged to the actual Libra cryptocurrency.”
He said:
“We’re going to fork the code, fork the community and create a new cryptocurrency called OpenLibra. There is no token sale. No equity and no company behind this initiative.”
The core team that works on OpenLibra’s employs people from blockchain projects including Cosmos and Web3. There are also some non-profit organizations, for example, the Danish Red cross.
Last month we reported of Libra’s managing director Bertrand Perez speaking at a blockchain event at the U.N. headquarters in Geneva, said Libra will not replace existing fiat currencies, but could help the UN achieve many of its goals.
Also let’s not forget that in July this year, International Monetary Fund acting Managing Director David Lipton said that Libra’s risks include “the potential emergence of new monopolies, and threats to financial stability”, among others.
Be it as it may, the OpenLibra project has published a “grey zone” version of the Libra virtual machine on GitHub. Unlike Facebook’s Libra, the code computations on OpenLibra, called “MoveMint,” will run atop Tendermint blockchain software specifically designed for use on public blockchain platforms such as Cosmos.
As it was noted anything that is available on FB’s Libra will run on OpenLibra. Everything will function in the same way.
Geiger also commented that together with his colleagues he decided he doesn’t want “a cartel company with the ethics of Uber and censorship of Visa” to be the sole proprietor of the Libra coin.
He said:
“In Libra we trust, in Facebook we don’t.”
It seems that Geiger and the rest of the OpenLibra team want to create a robust scheme in order to oversee the OpenLibra platform.
“This is a governance problem. Governments can attack Visa and Mastercard and Facebook from different angles and that makes for a fragile reserve currency. We have less regulatory exposure than Facebook. Governments have less leverage on us. … We gain strength by having more members that are decentralized not just geographically but politically and economically,” concluded he.