A consortium of more than a dozen companies—known as the Libra Association—have signed up to back the coin, which will be unveiled next week and is expected to launch in 2020. Other firms involved include Stripe, Booking.com and MercadoLibre, an Argentinian e-commerce site. The firms will invest about US$10 million each, and will have a role in developing the network, though details aren’t yet clear. Facebook declined to comment. Neither Facebook nor the Libra Association will directly control the coin. (Wall Street Journal, The Information)

Talking point: Libra is now backed by some of the largest card firms in the world, such as Visa and Mastercard, as well as large payments processors like Stripe and PayPal. For those companies, this initiative offers a way for them to monitor Facebook’s expansion into the crypto-payments space, a move that excludes the use of cards and fiat-currency payments. The success of the currency could come in part from Facebook’s monthly active user count, of which it has over 2.4 billion—an edge over cryptocurrencies that don’t come with as large of a user base. In comparison, the largest cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, had almost 32 million wallets as of March.