Facebook renamed its crypto wallet as Novi. Calibra. This is a digital wallet that is being built by the social media giant for access to Libra digital coins.
A new name for an old song. As the company explained on its blog, the new name was inspired by Latin “novus” and “via” that mean “new” and “way” respectively. A subsidiary of Facebook, the company dealing with crypto wallets, will now be called Novi Financial.
As previously reported, Libra rejected its initial plans to launch a digital currency with free access and no authorization that would be a solution for many issues concerning financial access because of the ongoing negative reaction of the regulators.
Libra was considered as an arguable project, especially in term of financial regulations. Then the project applied for licensing its personal payment system to the Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority (FINMA) in order to get a permission for public use of the system. One of the major updates to Libra technical document is setting the restrictions for users’ activity within the network. In particular, there are limitations for balance and transaction amounts, furthermore, the network will be available only for regulated crypto firms.
As it was stated on Novi website, the project is currently moving towards providing individual stable coins for main printed currencies including US dollars, euros and pounds. Previously Libra stable coin focused on supporting the world fiat (comprising Singapore dollar and Japanese yen). Despite the wallet’s name change, FB says the mission of Novi would remain the same, “making money exchanges as simple as “messaging”. A separate Novi application is a part of the plan which represents a version that is integrated with WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger. This enables users to easily send their money. David Marcus, one of the initial Calibra developers and the current Novi CEO, has mentioned on his Twitter that instead of creating a global digital payment network. the emphasis has shifted to introducing a wallet for stable coins. Although Libra aims to deal with central banks, those jurisdictions that will not integrate Libra support will be unable to use it.
Binance and its attitude towards the project. Binance has analyzed the recent update carefully and come to the conclusion that Facebook project may undermine the payment industry. There is a significant benefit in issuing a widely accessible programmable coin that would increase the efficiency. As an optimistic example, the “proposed global Libra payment system can do the same for the payment sector as SpaceX did with the space industry: to shake the basis of a sector with high entrance barriers”.
Elon Mask, the founder of SpaceX, was mentioned in the report as the space industry leader because if his decisive contribution to increasing the speed of rocket journeys.
The report also underlines that most if the payment systems are managed by central banks are have a regional scale, and Libra may have certain benefits as it can attract more users all around the world. As regards the financial access, abundance claims that Libra describes itself as a new financial basis necessary to “create a simple global currency infrastructure that gives new opportunities to billions of people”.