A year ago, Facebook announced it would create a global digital currency called “Libra” in order to help the billions of people around the world who lacked access to basic financial services. The currency would be a “stablecoin” backed by a basket of sovereign currencies such as the U.S. dollar, the euro and the Japanese yen. With it, Facebook claimed, you would be able to send money as easily as sending an email. The proposal provoked widespread skepticism about Mark Zuckerberg’s motives—surely financial inclusion was just a veil for data collection ambitions—as well as criticism that this would undermine the U.S. dollar and cause all sorts of other problems. But the proposal also prompted a number of central banks to initiate or speed up research on the possibility of government-issued digital currencies.
