Booking Holdings another Facebook Libra partner leaves the coalition of companies holding the founding member position at the Libra Foundation.
The cryptocurrency project of social media giant Facebook has recently suffered from a serious backsliding, as major payment companies withdrew from the project.
On Friday, Visa, MasterCard, eBay, Mercado Pago and Stripe, the Fintech startup abandoned the Libra Association. After this event, Libra Association was flooded with warnings from regulators and the politicians that the cryptocurrency project risked destabilizing the world economy and is also responsible for undermining the privacy of the users and is facilitating with the money laundering process.
An upcoming meeting that is to be held in Geneva and in that event, members of the Libra Association will be agreeing to the interim articles, as per the spokesperson of Vodafone, one of the highest-profile firms now left in the project after yet another Facebook Libra partner left the ship. Reportedly, a board will also be appointed in this meeting by the Libra Association.
Why Facebook Libra partner Booking Holdings left?
Booking Holdings chief executive officer Glenn Fogel expressed that the firm may have been able to hold their position if the project was more secure and had lesser privacy concerns. He furthers that,
We looked at what they were talking about, what they were thinking, and we said, yeah, we’d like to have a seat at the table as this develops… …We don’t know if it’s going to come off the ground or not.
Libra Association’s spokesperson declined to give any statements regarding the meeting. However, the group stated that the details of the meeting of the fifteen hundred entities that are enthusiastic about being part of the project would be provided after the meeting this month.
The Libra Association now comprises of twenty-two members including the ride-hailing companies like Lyft and Uber, it also includes some non-profit organizations and blockchain companies.
This withdrawal of these major financial companies tends to indicate that Facebook can no longer rely on these global players to support its consumers to convert their currency into Libra and facilitate transactions. This whole episode is likely to overshadow all the efforts of the Libra to persuade the politicians and the regulators about the safety of the coin.
