Joining the Libra Association

Today we announced that we have joined the Libra Association, the governance for a global stable coin. Nick has written a post on the USV blog explaining our decision. I have argued before that we don’t really know what path will take us to a decentralized future and therefore have to try many things. Some of these paths involve centralized corporations exposing their endusers to crypto. Nobody has more users than Facebook!

There is a historic analogy here to when Microsoft released Internet Explorer. That was a crucial step for the mass adoption of the Web. Yes, it was a reactive move and designed, infamously, to “cut off the air supply” for Netscape. And yet all the sudden millions of people had access who previously did not. That was in 1995. The following chart from Our World in Data shows what happened next:

It is useful to remember that Microsoft was not the primary beneficiary of the web. Instead, it resulted in the growth of whole host of new companies!

Now of course as Mark Twain has pointed out history doesn’t repeat but it rhymes. There are big differences here because Libra initially isn’t a completely open and decentralized system, the way the web was. So: much remains to be seen but the potential for a crossing of the chasm to mass adoption exists.