GlobalCoin Getting Backed by Visa, Mastercard & Uber

Globalcoin - Facebook’s new cryptocurrency - is highly anticipated in the crypto community to be the one thing that helps boost mass adoption. With the help of Visa, Mastercard, Uber and PayPal, this could eventually become a reality.

Reports surfaced earlier this week by the Wall Street Journal that the social network has signed on more than a dozen firms to back its cryptocurrency, a stablecoin that has been developed in secrecy for more than six months. Each of these new backers will invest roughly $10 million in the project as part of a governing consortium for the cryptocurrency.

On top of this, the report says that Booking.com, Stripe and MercadoLibre are three other companies that are part of the project but nothing has been specified on what their roles are as of yet.

Facebook has revealed that it was GlobalCoin last December, although the firm has suggested that it was looking at cryptocurrency as far back as the end of 2017. The stablecoin is expected to be one that will operate within the businesses messaging infrastructures such as Messenger, Instagram and the extremely popular WhatsApp.

Facebook has been taking a low-key approach to the cryptocurrency as they haven’t really given anything away. It’s still a question as to what GlobalCoin will actually be used for but the BBC has suggested that Facebook might look to retailers to allow their users to buy discounted goods using the stablecoin. The cryptocurrency would be used to transfer value directly from Facebook to the retailer, cutting out credit card companies as the middle man.

Even though retailers’ profits will be helped in this manner, you can’t help but ask what this will mean for credit card firms? Will people lose their jobs? Will companies go under? It’s unlikely that PayPal or Mastercard will plunge from this but it isn’t completely off the table if this is true.

Either way, GlobalCoin is a very interesting venture from Facebook and we are very excited to see what will happen. The stablecoin is expected to be officially unveiled on 18th June.