ANALYSIS: Lessons for Facebook Libra from the Tether Stablecoin

Cryptocurrencies have a reputation for questionable origins, evasion of regulation, and illicit use that clings to Libra and weighs down the project despite Facebook’s efforts to engage with regulators and address legal issues before actually having created the cryptocurrency. The resulting criticism in Congress has been so harsh that Ripple, a completely unrelated company, on July 29 published an open letter to congress that pleaded, “Please do not paint us with a broad brush. Many in the blockchain and digital currency industry are responsible actors.”

Significant differences between the Libra white paper proposal and the cryptocurrencies that seeded the ...