Founder of Alternative to Facebook’s Libra Exaggerates ‘Partnerships’

The founder of the OpenLibra project, Lucas Geiger, reportedly misrepresented some of the organizations involved in the project.

OpenLibra founder apologized through Telegram

On Oct. 11, Coindesk reported that at least four individuals and organizations denied the fact that they support the OpenLibra project. Others are minimizing their involvement in OpenLibra, which aims to become an alternative to Facebook's Libra.

Ethereum developer Lane Rettig excitedly took to Twitter on Oct. 8 to share Geiger's announcement of OpenLibra at the Ethereum developer conference Devcon 5, in Osaka, Japan, adding:

“Seeing #openlibra publicly announced for the first time is sending shivers down my spine. I am so excited about this initiative to ‘lock the door open’ for libra tech.”

During the launch, certain names were mistakenly associated with the project, while other names were used without proper permission. Some organizations were presented as members, when, in fact, they have nothing to do with OpenLibra. Geiger later apologized in a Telegram message to Chainlink CEO Sergey Nazorov and Coindesk, saying:

“We’ve been in a rush preparing materials, and my team took a list I had of partners and potential partners and put it on the site. It’s removed now. Apologies for the trouble that [this has] caused. I should have reviewed more closely.”

Launch of OpenLibra

Cointelegraph reported on Oct. 9 that OpenLibra’s developers had released the first version of the proposed alternative to Facebook's Libra stablecoin. The website explains:

“Despite pushback from nation-states, we believe that Facebook is likely to succeed in their goal. OECD Governments will be focused on their own outcomes, and in reality have little legislative power to leverage against a transnational force such as Facebook's Libra. For that reason we are creating OpenLibra.”