The five people who have been briefed on the Facebook team’s work said the company’s most immediate product was likely to be a coin that would be pegged to the value of traditional currencies, as Bloomberg first reported. Facebook is looking at pegging the value of its coin to a basket of different foreign currencies, rather than just the dollar, three people briefed on the plans said. Facebook could guarantee the value of the coin by backing every coin with a set number of dollars, euros and other national currencies held in Facebook bank accounts. The big question facing Facebook is how much control it would retain over the digital coin. If Facebook is responsible for approving every transaction and keeping track of every user, it is not clear why it would need a blockchain system, rather than a traditional, centralized system like PayPal.

Source: New York Times February 28, 2019 15:57 UTC