Libra Loses Another Heavyweight: Vodafone Jumps Off

The British telecommunications giant Vodafone has confirmed to Coindesk on Tuesday that it will withdraw from the Libra consortium, which consists of prominent companies dedicated to operating the upcoming Libra cryptocurrency.

Instead, Vodafone will devote its resources to the M-Pesa mobile payment platform, which the company plans to expand beyond the six African regions it currently serves. The platform met with strong opposition yesterday when the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) canceled M-Pesa’s Certificate of Authorization (CoA) and forced the company to withdraw from India.

“We have said from the outset that Vodafone’s desire is to make a genuine contribution to extending financial inclusion,” the spokesperson said. “We remain fully committed to that goal.”

Vodafone joins PayPal, Visa, Stripe and eBay in the mass exodus and is now the eighth major company to withdraw from the project. Although the majority of companies didn’t state why they were giving up the controversial stablecoin project, Visa said that regulatory uncertainty was responsible for the withdrawal.

“We will continue to monitor the development of the Libra Association and do not rule out the possibility of future cooperation,” the Vodafone spokesperson said.

In September, a prominent minister in France promised to block Libra’s development in Europe, while EU Finance Commissioner Valdis Dombrovskis promised to regulate it heavily. However, it is not all bad about the Facebook project. Libra claims that 1,500 other potential partners are waiting to join the Libra Foundation and that there are enough successors for the companies that left.

Libra recently founded a technical committee to better plan and implement further progress. Libra has really started a global discussion about the development of a digital currency. The Bank of England announced yesterday that it will form a task force with other central banks around the world to research the development of a central bank-supported digital currency (CBDC) and develop a catalog of measures.

China is already piloting the use of digital yuan in some provinces in the country and the billion-dollar city of Shenzhen. China will be the first country in the world to use a CBDC in a billion-dollar market. So far, the real impact on the economy and the population can only be guessed at. It will show whether these developments will have a positive impact on people’s lives.

Author: Marko Vidrih

Featured image credit: Pixabay