Why High-Profile Defections Aren’t Libra’s Biggest Challenge
Plus Square gets in on the LN game and Telegram sees support from the blockchain community
Yesterday, Vodafone became the 8th company to drop out of the Libra Association.
Predictably, the reaction of many was to cluck that this was one more bit of evidence that the besotted project seemed destined never to get off the ground.
I had a somewhat different take - that, more or less, it doesn’t matter. That’s not because this is good in any way for Libra, but because it’s so fundamentally incidental to the real challenges the project faces.
On today’s podcast, I go into the 4 biggest issues surrounding Libra, but increasingly, I think one question stands above the rest: how will US regulators respond to a Chinese digital currency? Will it continue to be some far-off thing that doesn’t really register as an actual economic threat, or will it kick in at some point that “holy shit, this is important and they’re 5+ years ahead”?
Also in this episode, Square Crypto announces its plans for a Lightning Development Kit while Square also announced a new patent that could make crypto easier to use. In regulatory battles, meanwhile, both the Blockchain Association and the Chamber of Digital Commerce have filed amicus briefs around the SEC-Telegram lawsuit.