Facebook’s Libra will debut in 2021

Libra, which has been in the works for over a year, initially planned to launch a synthetic coin backed by a multitude of currencies. So the plan had to be downgraded in April, when concerns from regulators forced a move to a plan to launch digital versions of several coins plus a “digital composite” of all Libra coins.

Now, the new plan is to flip a single coin that is backed one by one by the dollar, according to FT, with other currencies and composites to be launched at a later time.

The date is not yet set in stone and depends on how long it takes Libra to obtain approval from the Federal Financial Market Supervisory Authority (FINMA), but it is possible that this will happen by January, according to FT.

Libra first launched in June 2019, but regulators were concerned about the extent of what it wanted to do. They warned that the cryptocurrency could be used for money laundering and posed a threat to monetary stability, FT reported. While the scaled-down plans might be more palatable to regulators, however, critics say the single-currency requirement could undermine goals of greater financial stability by adding costs, making it more difficult for users to convert currencies.

In separate news, Libra may be one of the currencies that can work with FastPay, which a white paper by Mathieu Baudet, George Danezis and Alberto Sonnino, who are affiliated with Facebook’s Novi wallet, said it allows distributed authorities to maintain a high integrity and liquidation system of the availability for pre-financed payments.

FastPay, they said, is expected to function as a transaction settlement system for real-time gross settlement functions, including legal and other transactions involving crypto payments.