by John Smith 
PayPal withdraws from the Libra Association!
Avoiding an important meeting in Washington regarding the Libra Cryptocurrency Project had already made the rumor grow.
PayPal has officially announced its withdrawal from the Libra project according to the Wall Street Journal!
“PayPal has made the decision to forgo further participation in the Libra Association at this time and to continue to focus on advancing our existing mission and business priorities as we strive to democratize access to financial services for underserved populations,” PayPal declared.
PayPal says NO to Libra and Mark Zuckerberg who is currently focusing on the launch of Libra precisely.
Bad news for Libra whose PayPal was one of the most important members of the Libra Association which includes Visa.
Libra Association which counts other important members such as Uber, Stripe, Vodafone, Coinbase, Ebay, Mastercard.
PayPal who is particularly concerned about the money laundering aspects when the Libra cryptocurrency will be launched worldwide.
Due to the concerns raised by many governments, the important members of the Libra Association want to make sure that the consultations with the regulators and authorities lead to a positive acceptance of the Libra cryptocurrency.
This seems to be one of the reasons for the withdrawal of PayPal which says:
“It doesn’t seem that there was a lot of pre-work done with regulators. [Payments] companies don’t want that [regulatory scrutiny] to bleed into their businesses.”
PayPal leaves the door open for Libra by declaring:
“We remain supportive of Libra’s aspirations and look forward to continued dialogue on ways to work together in the future. Facebook has been a longstanding and valued strategic partner to PayPal, and we will continue to partner with and support Facebook in various capacities.”
The Libra Association reacted on Twitter following Paypal’s decision to withdraw:
Building a modern, low-friction, high-security payment network that can empower billions of financially underserved people is a journey, not a destination. This journey to build a generational payment network like the Libra project is not an easy path.
— Libra (@Libra_) October 4, 2019
It is therefore a bad news for Libra to see PayPal leave the Libra Association, which certainly hopes that this decision by PayPal will not bring other members of the association to do the same.
The withdrawal of a member of the association, as important as it is, does not question the progress of the Libra project and its planned launch in 2020.
Facebook can be quite confident in its crypto currency project, Apple has announced that it will not launch a cryptocurrency.
