Facebook cryptocurrency director: we don't act "like pirates"

"We do not intend to act as pirates" says Bertrand Perez, general director of the Libra association launched by Facebook, in an interview with the AFP in which he tries to reassure about the cryptocurrency project of the American giant, which raises so much suspicion.

His project raises comments and reticence at the political level. Do you understand these concerns?

“We are told about the risk to the currencies of the most fragile economies. But the first thing a State does when it wants to prevent its currency from weakening, is to implement exchange control, (and) nothing prevents it from implementing a blockade of the Libra exchange platforms, if that seems necessary.

(…) It is important to remember that the blockchain allows a significant level of transparency about transactions.

It is a new technology, it is normal for regulators to be vigilant, of course that is the reason we announced the Libra project a year before its launch; We were aware that we had to work with regulators. But if, for example, the European Central Bank (ECB) refuses us the right to operate in Europe, we will accept it. We do not intend to act as pirates, we respect the legislation ”.

How are your negotiations with the different regulators?

“We are based in Geneva, so we have started talking to the Finma (Swiss Financial Market Surveillance Authority, NDLR), which has identified us as a payment system, not as a bank or something else. Therefore we will be able to start the procedures for a registration request, integrating the necessary rules for that purpose.

Until now, most of the regulators in the world did not raise the issue of cryptocurrencies, simply because the volume of transactions was not significant, so they waited before they were pronounced. But now our clients are important enough for the competent authorities to decide to define a framework (…)

We also want to prevent Libra from falling into the volatility of the other cryptocurrencies. To the extent that it is a means of payment, for example for online purchases, we must guarantee users that they will not lose money if they own the Pound. We are going to attach it to a basket of five currencies (US dollar, euro, yen, British pound, Singapore dollar, NDLR) to guarantee its stability (…) ”.

Apart from the normative aspects, what are the next stages before the effective launch?

“We must first of all finalize our governance regulations. It is an issue on which the current 28 members work (…).

Then comes the whole technical aspect, with the implementation of validation nodes (of the transactions, NDLR), in each of our members, who have been selected to house these nodes for their great calculation capabilities and for having the habit of managing Security aspects

Then the knots will have to be joined together, and then the functionality and results tests phase will come.

Our goal is that at the launch in mid-2020 we have the capacity to process about 1,000 transactions per second, and then exceed that figure. ”