Just over 150 miles separate the Swiss cities of Basel and Geneva. For ten months, their distance has symbolized the gulf between the international regulators of the Financial Stability Board and the Libra Association, a corporate payments consortium led by Facebook. But this week marked a rapprochement,…
The French finance minister, Bruno Le Maire, delivered a scathing rebuke to Libra, the Facebook-led digital currency initiative, in the Financial Times this morning. Coming on the heels of several U.S. companies' withdrawal from the initiative after they received threatening letters from Senators Sherrod Brown and Brian…
By now everyone has heard of Libra, the new private digital money system announced last week, sponsored by Facebook and a consortium of other firms, to be rolled out in 2020. The project’s official white paper, “An Introduction to Libra,” calls it “a new decentralized blockchain, a…
The Wall Street Journal recently reported that Kik, a messaging app that raised close to $100 million dollars in a 2017 initial coin offering (ICO) of its “Kin” token, is challenging a proposed Securities and Exchange Commission enforcement action against the company. As has been discussed by…
Some prominent economists have begun to analyze formally the market for a privately issued outside money that they associate with Bitcoin. Rodney Garratt and Neil Wallace (2018) (ungated version here) model the relative values of (exchange rates between) “Bitcoin 1” and other hypothetical cryptoassets (“Bitcoin 2,” etc.)….