Welcome to the inaugural issue of The Libra Informer.
As stated in our About section, we are a curated weekly newsletter/digest of what is occurring in the world of the Libra.
Since this is the inaugural issue, each section of the newsletter comes with a brief description (in italics) of what it is about.
Once again, if you like the newsletter, please subscribe and recommend it to your friends and colleagues.
Top News
This section is for the week’s most important news announcements.
Libra’s announcement, of course! Here is Libra co-founder/Calibra lead David Marcus, introducing the project on Twitter.
Still unsure what Libra even is? Read this helpful summary by Tomas Roaldsnes, Gustaf Hård af Segerstad, and Vladyslav Munin.
The Block goes even further, laying out the more comprehensive summary of the Libra on the Internet so far.
News and Analysis
This section is for general Libra-related news, along with more in-depth analyses from a variety of sources.
Striking while the iron’s hot, eToro announced that it was looking into how their tokenized assets would work on Libra. Initial experimentation shows promise.
Jameson Lopp, Bitcoin engineer and the CTO of Casa, conducted a thorough analysis of the Libra’s technical documentation.
Dapper Labs, the company behind CryptoKitties, also provided a general analysis of the Libra’s technical design.
Want to know more about what differentiates Ethereum from Libra? Adam Warski over at SoftwareMill Tech Blog has you covered.
Pony Ma, the founder of WeChat, commented on the Libra (in Chinese). A summarized take: “the technology is already very mature, it’s not too difficult. It all depends on whether regulators allow it.”
Lee Ting Ting, a scholar at Berkeley’s Blockchain Lab, conducted a deep dive into Move, the new programming language behind Libra.
Tyler Cowen, renown economist and professor of economics at George Mason University, shared his thoughts on the Libra and using it for remittances.
In a rather long Twitter thread, Coin Center executive director Jerry Brito runs through the Libra’s documentation and concludes that the ecosystem probably won’t become permissionless.
JP Koning, a noted financial writer, compares the Libra to the artificial language Esperanto. He also comments on Cowen’s views on remittances.
Steve Forbes, Chairman and Editor-in-Chief of Forbes, penned an open letter to Mark Zuckerberg with some friendly advice regarding the Libra. This includes backing the currency with gold and changing the currency’s name to the “Mark.”
Association
This section is for news about the Libra Association’s members. This includes new members, members’ work on the Libra, and notable organizations that have expressed interest in joining the Association.
Andressen Horowitz provides some background as to why the company joined the Libra Association. The firm has spent a lot of time thinking about mobile money. Their 2017 presentation on the subject is helpful.
Likewise, Union Square Ventures explains the VC firm’s reasoning for joining. As did, in separate blog posts, Creative Destruction Lab, Bison Trails, and Spotify.
However, The New York Times’ Nathaniel Popper put out a piece hinting that the Association isn’t exactly a united front.
Cryptocurrency exchange Binance has indicated interest in serving as a validator node for the Libra network. Relatedly, the exchange is interested in listing the currency once it goes live.
The CEO of Spankchain, Ameen Soleimani, proposed a rather unorthodox idea: could the Ethereum community become one of the validators of the Libra?
Regulatory
This section covers the latest regulatory pronouncements and events that affect the Libra.
Reactions to the Libra’s announcements were swift and furious. French finance minister Bruno Le Maire declared that it is “out of the question that [the Libra] becomes a sovereign currency. It can’t and it must not happen.” U.S. representative Maxine Waters, chairwoman of the House Financial Services Committee, called on Facebook to halt the development of the Libra. Similarly, U.S. senator Sherrod Brown, a senior member of the Senate Banking Committee, put out a statement, saying that Facebook cannot be allowed “to run a risky new cryptocurrency out of a Swiss bank account without oversight.”
Both chambers of Congress have scheduled hearings for next month ( on July 16 and 17).
On a more cheerful note, the Bank of England’s governor, Mark Carney was more diplomatic, saying that was keeping an “open mind” to the Libra. He did warn, however, that the Libra would find no “open door” to its launch.
Given its current cryptocurrency ban, India might not allow the Libra to operate within the country, according to an article from The Economic Times.
A number of other experts in the industry note that the Libra is going to run the regulatory gauntlet. Sean Park, founder and chief investment officer at VC firm Anthemis, says that the Libra will require “literally hundreds, perhaps thousands, of licenses from hundreds of different regulators across the globe.”
Stephen Palley, a noted legal commentator in the cryptocurrency/blockchain world, went through and annotated the Libra white paper. The number of questions he puts forward is a reminder of the number of things that have to be considered before the Libra can go live.
Developers
This section is for developers who want to know where they can find some useful resources. It also showcases some projects that the community has been working on.
Libra’s own website provides a good amount of helpful documentation for individuals seeking to get started.
Community member learndapp has put together a curated list of resources for Libra. This includes efforts submitted by the community.
Continuing from the above, some Libra community members have put together some Libra block explorers for the testnet. These include Librabrowser.io, LibraVista, Libranaut, and Libratics.
Additionally, the team over at Kulap.io has put together a server-based Libra Wallet proof-of-concept. As of recently, it has more than 3,000 downloads and 21,000 test transactions.
A Chinese blockchain game developer, Pure White Matrix, says it has released a cloud-based integrated development environment (IDE) tool to access Move. According to them, it can reduce compiling time from 1 hour to 3 minutes. (Source is in Chinese)
The team at Curl, a payment app, showed off a rather nice-looking Libra wallet that they built rather quickly.
For your Career
This section is for those who are looking for a job in the Libra ecosystem. It will list new opportunities as they become available.
Facebook’s Libra-focused subsidiary, Calibra, is naturally looking for professionals to ramp up its efforts at developing the currency. There are currently 6 listings for data engineers and data scientists.
Facebook is also looking to fill numerous other positions as it seeks to ramp up its blockchain efforts, ranging from legal counsel to program managers.
Community
This section is for newcomers who want to join the Libra community, particularly developers and those who want to build on the Libra ecosystem, want help, or are just generally interested in talking to people about Libra.
The Libra’s official forum. This the best place to ask questions, particularly since Calibra’s engineers check the more technical-oriented subforums every so often.
Thoughts are welcome. Suggestions for the newsletter, both in terms of content and structure, can be submitted to geheimnis086@gmail.com. Or you can find “Dunny” on the Libra developers’ Discord group.
A special thanks to Libra community member CasalettoJ/CircuitDev for his technical advice in composing this newsletter. He is working on a wallet for the Libra testnet.