Twitter's Jack Dorsey: Firm Rejection of Libra Membership

In a Twitter event, @jack claimed he has no intentions to support the Libra Association or to have Twitter as a block-producing member.

Twitter’s CEO Jack Dorsey has no intentions of signing up his company as a member of the Libra Association. He stated his hard refusal during a Twitter media event in New York, reported The Verge. He stated Libra was redundant, and he did not support Facebook’s idea to try out a cryptocurrency.

“It’s not an internet open standard that was born on the internet,” Dorsey said. “It was born out of a company’s intention, and it’s not consistent with what I personally believe and what I want our company to stand for.”

Dorsey said that Facebook could have attempted to democratize the worldwide financial system, but using a cryptocurrency was not needed.

“I don’t know if it’s a gimmick,” Dorsey said, “but a cryptocurrency wasn’t necessary to make that work.”

Dorsey, however, expressed his support for genuine grass-roots movements that build truly decentralized networks. Twitter remains one of the busiest social media for the crypto community, and even offers Lightnin-network powered micropayments.

The skeptical statements arrived just after an uncomfortable, question-laden hearing of Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg before the US House of Representatives Financial Services Committee and selected congressmen. Zuckerberg tried to present Libra as an opportunity to reach out to the unbanked, but was met with skepticism and calls for additional legislation to regulate Libra.

Participating in the Libra Association also turned out to be too cumbersome for some of the members, and seven of the founding companies left. Among them were some of the biggest payment providers, including VISA, MasterCard, and PayPal.

At this point, Libra Association members may have a greater weight and responsibility, as Zuckerberg tried to distance Facebook from the potential day-to-day running of the Libra digital coin, once it appears.

The curbs before the Libra coin translated into heightened scrutiny of other blockchains, including Bitcoin. The expectation is that in 2020, digital assets would receive heightened monitoring as part of anti-money-laundering measures.