THE GHOST OF FACEBOOK'S LIBRA'S PAST

Summary from the TLDR Crypto newsletter

Meta's stablecoin project came much closer to regulatory approval than commonly believed. The Swiss regulator FINMA was ready to approve Meta's license before political intervention killed the project. Stripe's Tempo faces the same fundamental flaw that doomed Libra: corporate chains with centralized control will inevitably break promises about neutrality and permissionlessness due to economic incentives to favor their own products over competitors. The core tension is between crypto's original vision of truly open, permissionless networks versus the pragmatic appeal of "slick, branded, proprietary chains" controlled by fintech giants. The success of corporate blockchain projects like Tempo would represent the failure of crypto as a revolution, simply replacing traditional financial monarchies with new centralized empires controlled by tech companies, potentially splitting along geopolitical lines rather than creating a unified global infrastructure.