Facebook’s cryptocurrency may be facing more regulatory supervision as the EU’s finance commissioner has pledged to introduce new law proposals for digital money.
Valdis Dombrovskis is Lativa’s former prime minister and the current executive vice president of the European Commission and the commissioner for financial stability, financial services and capital markets union.
During a confirmation hearing this week, Dombrovskis said, “Europe needs a common approach on crypto-assets such as Libra. I intend to propose new legislation on this.”
Dombrovskis neglected to state a timeline for when the new law proposals would be announced, but that they should focus on the defending financial stability, consumer rights and tackling money-laundering risks.
At the moment, the EU does not have any laws in place about cryptocurrencies and Dombrovskis has resisted regulating digital currencies in the five years he has served, according to Reuters.
However, in the hearing he echoed the concerns of German and French lawmakers, saying that Facebook’s Libra project “could have systemic effects on financial stability”.
For instance, Bruno Le Marie, France’s finance minister, has said that Libra could become so humongous that it would put “the monetary sovereignty of states [in] jeopardy.”
An argument along a similar vein was stated in September by Benoît Cœuré, executive board member of the European Central Bank, when he told the German Bundestag that this is the first time in the history of the world that cryptocurrencies could “have a truly global footprint.”
The news comes about a week after PayPal became the first Libra backer to back out of the project as the pressure from lawmakers around the world kept growing.
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