It’s been over half a year, and Facebook’s Libra is still on top media outlet shelves. It started as an innovative international payment gateway, only to end up being criticized by international monetary overseers and policymakers, who desperately try to make it look like a bad idea.

History has taught us that 99% of the time, media mean exactly the opposite of what they propose, and I believe it’s no different with Libra in this case.

Remember when Huawei not only announced but practically proved there is no 5G without Huawei technology involved, the world and paid media started to panic, trying to fight it out, in an attempt to escape the Chinese monopoly?

Or when Google introduced its new terms back in 2016, essentially forcing you to have a Google account that’s being monitored, otherwise services including YouTube, Gmail, and even Search would not function properly, if at all, and people and media were again outraged and the topic was the focus of international tech-lens for a short time?

What I am trying to say, is that before we condemn Facebook’s Libra, we should analogize that we use Google normally every day and no one questions it. As for 5G, there are a couple of companies who can deliver the next-generation networking technology, including but not limited to Ericsson, Nokia, and Verizon, but again, all of them have confirmed that 5G is not possible without Huawei equipment, whether that would be antennas, modems, or chipsets.

Concluding, Facebook’s venture to create its own international monetary system should be naturally criticized, and scare people who are afraid of monopolies, sometimes even people who maintain monopolies on their own, as a new monopoly would threaten their respective model’s sovereignty.

The black-sheep of digital payments

But…and that’s a generous ‘but’, as I am not a big fan of Libra myself either, we should think outside the box, and see whether Libra is really so bad and will fail as JPM’s CEO Jamie Dimon stated recently, or it is just the typical media game that will signal Libra’s success when the ‘news’ will be done tackling with it.

There is countless news regarding Libra, ranging from PayPal, Mastercard, Visa and other key initial partners withdrawing from the Libra Association, to Facebook being close to getting finned for $3.5bn for face data leaks, and with a mature eye, it all seems like a blackmail-style scenario against Facebook, mostly run by governments and central banks who are the future victims to be affected the most from Libra’s success.

I know one thing for sure. You don’t need PayPal as a partner to create a digital payments platform. You just need enough money to pay PayPal to make it for you, and if Facebook isn’t short on something, that would be definitely cashflow.

David Marcus, CEO of Libra, seems positive every time he’s confronted with ‘issues’ regarding Libra, and it seems so far that every time he has a fixed solution just right under his sleeve.

From making Libra a project based on national currencies such as the USD, rather than being a synthetic stablecoin as initially proposed, to creating stablecoins for each major native state-backed currency, Libra is ready to shift and adapt to modern times, under approved and regulated frameworks, so it’s hard to see how they’re going to stop its development and deployment mid next year.

“We’ve always said that we wouldn’t go forward unless we have addressed all legitimate concerns and get proper regulatory approval,” David Marcus told Reuters.

Verdict

Thinking of how Libra is treated, I can only recall when Huawei was charged with spying on US citizens, with the later’s government going as far as illegally seizing Huawei’s CFO on Canadian soil back in 2018. Despite the accusations, and the still ongoing US-China trade-war which many believe was sparked by Huawei’s decision to monopolize the next-generation telco tech, Huawei and 5G are almost synonyms nowadays and nothing can stop it.

A greek proverb says “When you hear of many cherries, hold a small basket”, and I think it best describes the situation generating around Libra this period.

I am certain Libra will succeed, not because of good tech, or innovative services, or the implementation of unique distributed ledger technology, but because it has already succeeded, having a network of over 2 billion regular users scattered all over the globe, that are going to meet Libra, whether they want it or not, similar to when they met ‘stories’, ‘groups’, ‘pages’ and all that stuff Facebook has to offer over time.