The Biggest Challenge for Facebook’s Libra Is Money
The social media platform’s planned experiment with cryptocurrency needs to work as well as regular currency
It’s a question you might start hearing more: “Cash, credit, or crypto?”
A recent spate of retail businesses like AT&T and Whole Foods have started accepting payment in Bitcoin. Meanwhile, Facebook announced its new cryptocurrency platform Libra, with the goal of making one global digital currency that everyone can use to make payments and store money. Yet they all struggle to answer a basic question: do consumers really need to pay their bills with cryptocurrencies?
Cryptocurrencies present a unique problem for retailers. On the one hand, it makes sense to accept payments through any means possible, and currencies like Bitcoin can have much lower processing fees than credit cards, which saves companies like AT&T money. On the other hand, almost no one is clamoring to pay for things with cryptocurrencies. When PornHub started accepting crypto payments — arguably the ideal use case for pseudonymous payments — less than 1% of its customers took the option.
Facebook’s Libra platform is designed to help this problem by making cryptocurrency accessible to its billions of users across Facebook, Instagram, and…
