Facebook Libra creates 5-member committee to ‘steer’ technical roadmap

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The Libra Association has established a five-member committee to oversee the technical development of its proposed Libra digital currency. The new committee will direct the technical roadmap among other roles.

In its press release, the Association revealed that it had voted to establish a Technical Steering Committee (TSC) for the project. The five elected members of the committee were brought in to “contribute a unique perspective and bring valuable domain expertise to the project.”

The TSC is expected to reinvigorate Libra, a project that had taken the world by storm but is now slowly sinking. The opposition has been immense, from regulators especially, with even Mark Zuckerberg conceding in an interview a few months ago that the projected 2020 launch is looking more unlikely. In December, a member of the Libra board slammed the project’s lack of solid strategy in its rollout.

With the formation of the new committee, the Libra Association hopes it can overcome these doubts and challenges and finally get the Libra ball rolling again. The TSC will direct the technical roadmap of the project and guide its codebase development. It will also form technical working groups that will undertake research into specific issues facing the project, while also building an engaged Libra developer community.

The Association stated, “It has always been the Association’s vision that the Libra project would be self-governing and independent of any one organization’s control. […] In Q1 2020, the TSC will publish its technical governance framework and associated documents. This will include the process by which the open source community can propose technical changes to the network and a transparent process for evaluating those proposals.”

Diogo Monica, the president of crypto custodian Anchorage is one of the members of the TSC. Diogo is a security expert who was key in developing the systems used by payments platform Square and app development platform Docker. He’s joined by Joe Lallouz, the CEO of blockchain infrastructure company Bison Trails. Others members include Ric Shreves, the director of emerging technology at non-profit organization Mercy Corps, and George Cabera, the core product lead at Calibra, Libra’s dedicated digital wallet.

The final member is Nick Grossman, a partner at Union Square Ventures. This is a billion-dollar VC firm that has invested in over 100 companies including Coinbase, Stack Overflow, Twitter and Zynga. Nick remarked, “Libra has the potential to be a breakthrough project in the digital asset and payments space. To achieve this potential, the project must demonstrate credible independence and be welcoming to potential partners and contributors.”