Facebook Coin Attracts Investment From Big Players

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Facebook’s much anticipated cryptocurrency, Project Libra, has attracted investments from some of the top tech companies in the world, in a sign that the project could be every bit as revolutionary for the cryptocurrency ecosystem as suggested. But what has the crypto world made of what we know so far?

Big Money Comes In

Despite no concrete details having come directly from Facebook in relation to the coin, speculation has nevertheless risen dramatically in the past week or so, with a list of investors having been revealed, including PayPal, Mastercard, Visa, Uber, and Stripe. Suggestions are that they have invested around $10 million each to the project, which will take the form of a stablecoin backed by a basket of balanced fiat currencies. The imminent arrival of Facebook’s token has started a debate on social media, with various crypto luminaries chipping in with their opinions:

A Threat to Bitcoin?

Opinion is clearly divided on the subject, which is to be surprised when there is so little to go on and the company at hand is a monolithic data hoarder stepping into a world with privacy at its core. It is thought that the token will work with a delegated proof-of-stake consensus mechanism like EOS, with 100 validator nodes initially created. Suggestions are that each node will cost $10 million to run, meaning that some of those big investors may well end up being validators themselves, although the rewards of doing so are not yet known. Among the discussion is the question of whether Facebook’s coin presents a threat to Bitcoin, with some arguing that it can do what Bitcoin tried to do but quicker and cheaper (and with Facebook tracking your every purchase and transfer), while others have a much more simple take:

Whatever we find out when Facebook finally lets the genie out of the bottle, it will be sure to stir debate all the way until launch day…whenever that might be.

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