By
Bhushan Akolkar
April 23rd, 2024
The Libra Association mentions four key milestone to be achieved before the mainnet launch. The focus is to get at least 100 partners working as operating nodes on the Libra network.
There has been a lot of negativity surrounding the launch of Facebook Libra over the last few months. Global regulators and banking institutions have showered severe criticism over the project. However, despite several kickbacks, the Libra Association is proceeding ahead with its plans of mainnet launch.
Recently, the Libra Association has published a new roadmap that highlights 4 major milestones to be attained before the launch of the Libra network. The Calibra team says that the first milestone will be to get five partners working as operating nodes. By the time of attaining the fourth milestone, the Calibra team plans to have at least 100 nodes on the network.
The Libra Association says that each node will “run on a mixture of on-premises and cloud-hosted infrastructure” further adding that “wider diversity of infrastructure will provide more resiliency to the Libra network”. The Libra Association says:
“One method we use for tracking the project’s success is how many of the deployed nodes are managed by different partners. The end goal of Mainnet is for all partners to have nodes deployed on the network”.
Note that all four milestones are part of Libra’s Pre-Mainnet environment. It is basically a testing environment available only to a few Libra partners who have successfully deployed full Libra nodes. The pre-mainnet environment will allow partner nodes to communicate with each other successfully and test the stability of the Libra network. The blog post states:
“We want to ensure the Libra network can meet rigorous performance benchmarks and overall system stability before opening access.”
Major Roadblocks to Libra
Facebook’s Libra project is facing tough challenges from all ends. While the regulators have been going hard after Libra in the last few months, some banks in the U.S. and Europe are also speaking in the same tune.
Recently, some of the top banking institutions in the United States have issued warnings that the Libra project will create a shadow banking system. Basically, the banks are concerned that Libra will make their business model redundant and will ultimately lead to the death of bank deposits and transaction volumes.
The banks said:
“As consumers adopt Libra, more deposits could migrate onto the platform, effectively reducing liquidity, and that disintermediation may further expand into loan and investment services.”
On the other hand, major Libra partners like PayPal, Visa, and Mastercard have said that they are likely to pull out of the Libra Association citing Facebook’s long-going war with the regulators. They say that they are not willing to get into the bad books of the regulators in the long term.