Canadian E-Commerce Giant Shopify Joins Libra Association

Published on by Cointele | Published on

E-commerce giant Shopify has joined the Libra Association, a network of founding members supporting Facebook's stablecoin project Libra.

Shopify, a major Canada-based digital commerce platform hosting more than one million merchants, will be collaborating on the establishment of a global payment network within the Libra Association, the firm officially announced on Feb. 21.

The Libra Foundation has confirmed the news in a Facebook post, outlining that Shopify would be an "Incredible partner in making widespread economic participation a reality."

"Our mission is to make commerce better for everyone and to do that, we spend a lot of our time thinking about how to make commerce better in parts of the world where money and banking could be far better. That's why we decided to become a member of the Libra Association. This is one step, but not the only step we'll be taking to be a part of the solution to this global problem."

Shopify's entrance to the Libra Association comes after a series of departures from the group by major global firms, which many associated with increased concerns of global regulators.

Cointelegraph asked both the Libra Association and Shopify about the potential implications of the new addition to Libra's founding group but did not receive an immediate response.

Some global banks admitted that Facebook's Libra pushed central banks to seriously look into digital currency initiatives like central bank digital currencies.

A number of big companies like Visa, EBay, Stripe and Mastercard decided to leave the Libra Foundation amid the regulatory uncertainty behind the project, which originally received support from dozens of major companies.

As Facebook originally prospected, the Libra Foundation should have around 100 members by the time of Libra's launch in the first half of 2020.

Existing uncertainty over Libra has been increasing even more with the European Union recently claiming that it still cannot figure out what to do about Libra.

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