Circle CEO Testifies Before Senators To Distance The Firm From Facebook’s Libra

Founded in 2013, Circle is a peer-to-peer payments technology company that has its own payment platform, Circle Pay, which allows users to hold, send, and receive traditional fiat currencies to others.

The CEO and founder of Circle, Jeremy Allaire has spoken out in regards to Facebook’s upcoming cryptocurrency, Libra.

Now that the social giant is getting stuck in with cryptocurrencies, the spotlight is focused primarily on stablecoins. But recently, Allaire testified in front of the United States Senate and said that he wants regulators to understand and get to grips with the main differences between the dollar and Libra.

In describing stablecoins, Allaire says that they are the “critical building blocks for the future digital economy.” but as he points out, not all stablecoins are the same. So while the USD Coin is backed 1:1 by a single fiat currency, Libra will be backed by several.

The CEO explains how Circle’s stablecoin has a lot more use cases than Libra.

“While USDC was initially launched with a focus on trading and markets use-cases, similar to Libra, it has been designed to expand into payments and settlement for both consumers and businesses. Because it is built on the most popular smart contract platform, Ethereum, we also expect USDC to be used for financial contracts and other tokenized digital assets.” 

Furthermore, Libra is limited to its native blockchain while Circle’s CENTRE “is becoming blockchain agnostic,” according to its founder.

The clearest difference between USD Coin and Libra is that Circle’s stablecoin launched at the end of last year whereas Facebook’s Libra coin is yet to see release, and if the regulatory bodies keep on the way they are, then it may never see launch.

“Over $1 billion has been tokenized, and over $500 million redeemed, through our services. US Dollar Coin is now the largest and fastest-growing financially transparent stablecoin issued by regulated financial institutions.”

Allaire isn’t alone either as previously reported by Cryptodaily, in an open letter - written by Brad Garlinghouse, (CEO of Ripple) and Chris Larsen (Executive Chairman and Co-founder of Ripple) - the two speak of the uncertainty faced by digital currencies after the disagreements between Facebook and lawmakers. 

In the letter, the two first ask Congress to not “paint us with a broad brush”. Read more this here.