Facebook must overcome a severe lack of trust if it hopes to bring Libra, its new cryptocurrency, to the masses

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• Facebook in June unveiled “Project Libra,” its plan to bring cryptocurrency to the masses.

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• This week, Facebook’s cryptocurrency chief David Marcus, formerly president of PayPal, testified before a bipartisan Senate committee to answer questions about why Facebook should build a digital currency, given its recent track record of privacy-related scandals.

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• Facebook says the idea is to let people shop on Facebook and other apps, or even pay other users, using a single global currency – and that if they don’t do it, a foreign company will build this instead.

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• Libra could be a good idea, but I don’t like that Facebook is spearheading the project.

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I use Facebook, but I don’t trust it.

That’s why I’m skeptical of Libra, a new cryptocurrency that Facebook is spearheading.

Facebook is in Washington, D.C. this week as its cryptocurrency chief David Marcus answers questions from the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs about the Libra cryptocurrency, which is scheduled to launch sometime in 2020.

In the first day of questions on Tuesday, Facebook’s Marcus answered questions for over two hours, with many senators remaining extremely skeptical that Facebook is capable of handling such an important responsibility like designing and overseeing a digital currency, given its past. Facebook was the center of dozens of scandals in 2018, including the Cambridge Analytica scandal, where a UK firm illegitimately harvested data from tens of millions of Facebook profiles in 2014 without their knowledge or consent, in an attempt to influence the 2016 presidential election.

“Trust is primordial, and we’ve made mistakes in the past,” Marcus told the Senate committee on Tuesday. “We’re continuing to work really hard to get better … we’ve invested in a number of programs to get better.”

To address this issue of trust, Facebook promises that it won’t launch Libra until regulators’ concerns are satisfied. The company also insists it won’t be responsible for all of Libra; that responsibility belongs to the Libra Association, where Facebook is only one member. The Libra Association plans to have 100 members.