Former Brazilian Governor Expresses Concerns Over Libra

The current chair of the International Monetary Fund, Christine Lagarde is starting to believe that central bankers slowly coming around to bitcoin. The nominee for the presidency of the European Central Bank and now the former governor of Brazil's monetary authority has called the leading cryptocurrency spectacular.

In an article published by a local Brazilian media outlet called Estadão, Gustavo Franco has also given praise to virtual currencies. For those that don’t know, Franco “was the governor of the Brazilian Central Bank twice in the 1990s and a chief architect of the Real Plan reforms that ended a run of severe hyperinflation.” and wrote the article from Estadão.

He writes that Bitcoin’s large market cap puts it in the same league as many of the globe’s companies

“Bitcoin is the most spectacular case of cryptocurrency because if it were a business it would be worth $175 billion (value of all outstanding bitcoins). Only it has no shares, no shareholders or governance.”

He also adds that put together, the market cap of all the other cryptocurrencies is just less than $100 billion, with several of those assets being worth more than $1 billion each in market cap.

Libra and Franco

The former governor talked about other forms of new money and methods of payments in his articles and of course, Facebook’s upcoming stablecoin, Libra.

Even though he has praised the innovation of the project as well as its scale, he has got concerns whether this kind of project could involve the same internal controls as those that apply to banks. Furthermore, he has suggested that if he is successful, it could apply to other global corporate giants.

“In theory, any global company, even other than 'big tech' could do something similar: McDonald's could create the Mac, a cryptocurrency convertible into Big Macs; Starbucks, the Star, working as a cappuccino voucher, all in blockchain.”