France needs its own digital "EuroCoin" to compete with Libra



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French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire said Europe should consider its own "public digital currency" that could challenge Facebook's Libra.

The minister's remarks – the latest in a series of concerns about the cryptocurrency projects of the social media giant – were reported by Reuters on September 13.

"EuroCoin"? against the titan of technology

At a meeting of EU finance ministers in Helsinki, The Mayor told reporters that he would discuss the problem of a possible European public digital currency with his fellow EU ministers the next month.

He also reiterated his concern that the balance-of-scale bill could pose risks to consumers, financial stability and even "the sovereignty of European states".

The Mayor urged the bloc to continue its efforts to reduce the costs of cross-border payments.

As Reuters notes, real-time payments in the euro area are available as of 2017, but the system only mobilized about half of the banks in the bloc. In addition, the project is currently largely implemented for domestic payments.

The limbo of Europe

In addition to these proposals, The Mayor said the bloc needed to rethink its approach to cryptocurrency regulation at the EU level.

Repeating his calls to refuse to authorize the launch of Libra in the European Union, the Mayor argued that the current state of uncertainty – in which regulators continue to debate the question of the regulation of cryptocurrencies as securities, payment services or currencies – must be resolved by creating a robust and common framework.

Given this legal uncertainty, a spokeswoman for the European Commission reportedly told Reuters that "with the publicly available information on Libya, it is currently impossible to say what exact rules the EU has. s & # 39; apply ".

France promises to block the development of Libra on European soil

As we just said yesterday, The Mayor strongly declared that the persistent concerns about the Facebook project meant that "under these conditions, we can not allow the development of Libra on European soil".

Previously, he had stated that he would ask Facebook to guarantee that Libra would not be exploitable for illicit business purposes and called the proposed stablecoin an "attribute of state sovereignty" .

Although many regulatory and legal issues remain to be resolved, the EU's Fifth Anti-Money Laundering Directive, which entered into force in July 2018, revised the legal framework by which EU financial supervision can mitigate the risks of money laundering and terrorist financing. the cryptocurrency sector.

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