Libra co-creator still has regulatory ‘PTSD’ from her time at Facebook

The co-creator of the Libra, Morgen Beller says dealing with regulators while working on Facebook’s controversial Libra project still reverberates.

Libra co-creator still has regulatory ‘PTSD’ from her time at Facebook

During a session at Consensus 2021, Beller said, “I think I have some PTSD and regulatory scars,” speaking alongside representatives of Visa, the Dash cryptocurrency, and Terraform Labs.

Beller is credited as a co-creator of the Libra project, a cryptocurrency envisioned by Facebook as a global payments rails. 

The social media giant, Facebook met enormous resistance at home and from global regulators who believed its plan could significantly undermine the monetary system built by nation-states.

“You probably need to be a cowboy if you’re a startup – not coming from Facebook –  to break down those barriers,” Beller said.

As an investor, Beller says she talks to much smaller companies and gets flashbacks to her Facebook days when they sketch out their visions.

Beller is looking for projects that solve the real needs of users rather than adhering to a deeper crypto ideology or requiring people to grasp blockchains 100% to use their solutions. “You can’t expect non-crypto users to learn what blockchain is,” she said.

She stated most people don’t know how the internet itself or even their automobiles work, they just look for tools to do things they need to be done. 

“I refer to Bitcoin and Ethereum as the immaculate conception coins,” she said. “If the U.S. government did want to kill bitcoin, they can’t. They can make it hard for Americans to use bitcoin, but they can’t kill it.”