Following the recent departure of PayPal, four additional high-profile backers have publicly cut ties with Facebook-led Libra.
With the exodus of Visa, Mastercard, eBay and Stripe; a total of five from the original 28 founding Libra members have departed the project, in a period of just one week. Only 23 remain as of writing.
Of all these, eBay would be the least surprising (nor significant): considering its relationship / brand ties, and close history with PayPal Holdings.
The news was first broken by Financial Times, later backed up by staff members from Bloomberg, and developed by CoinDesk. The former also shared that Mercado Prago was also rumoured to be leaving Libra, although this is yet to be confirmed.
“We will continue to evaluate and our ultimate decision will be determined by a number of factors…
Visa’s continued interest in Libra stems from our belief that well-regulated blockchain-based networks could extend the value of secure digital payments”
Visa (via Financial Times)
In our previous article, we posited that the departure of PayPal could easily signal the beginning of a future exodus. We also observed that PayPal was heavily overshadowed by the continued membership of Visa and Mastercard, which signal criticisms of anti-competitive monopolistic activity.
These predictions appear to have come true much faster than we could have anticipated, with four out of five founding members in the finance industry to have left. Only Payu remains.
If our prior hypothesis is also to ring true, the recent exodus of payments giants from Libra should help to alleviate major criticisms of monopolisation that have come from regulators and central banks. Especially when you look at Telegram’s TON project, which comes from a rival social platform yet has only received a fraction of the pressure from lawmakers.
“Mastercard has decided it will not become a member of the Libra Association at this time…
We believe there are potential benefits in such initiatives and will continue to monitor the Libra effort.”
Mastercard (via CoinDesk)
Libra: Who’s Who, and Whose Gone?
Payments: MasterCard, PayPal, Payu, Stripe, Visa.
Technology and marketplace: Booking Holdings, eBay, Facebook Calibra, Farfetch, Lyft, Mercado Pago, Spotify, Uber.
Telecommunications: iliad, Vodafone.
Blockchain: Anchorage, BisonTrails, Coinbase, Xapo.
Venture capital: Andreessen Horowitz, Breakthrough Initiatives, Ribbit Capital, Thrive Capital, Union Square Ventures.
Non-profit and multilateral organizations, academic institutions: Creative Destruction Lab, Kiva, Mercy Corps, Women’s World Banking.
23 / 28 Founding Members Remaining
