Libra, Facebook’s highly contested cryptocurrency project, has implemented significant changes into its business model and is now trying to appease global financial regulators. The Libra Association, the project’s governing body comprising various companies and organizations, has pulled back from its original vision of creating a global cryptocurrency backed by a basket of fiat currencies.

Instead, the consortium now wants to use the Libra platform to issue several different stablecoins backed by different national currencies. The massive change in Libra’s overall plan was announced earlier today in a cover letter to the now-revised Libra whitepaper. The company acknowledged that its original vision for Libra, which was to make it a network that complements fiat currencies, interfered with financial regulations around the world.

“While our vision has always been for the Libra network to complement fiat currencies, not compete with them, a key concern that was shared was the potential for the multi-currency Libra Coin (≋LBR) to interfere with monetary sovereignty and monetary policy if the network reaches significant scale and a large volume of domestic payments are made in ≋LBR,” it said in the cover letter.

Yoni Assia, CEO, and Co-founder of eToro told 8btc:

“We are pleased to see the Libra Foundation take an initial step in this direction, by supporting multiple currencies on-chain. We believe that this marks another milestone in the journey towards the adoption of distributed systems in global finance.

That’s why the consortium decided to augment the Libra network by issuing single-currency stablecoins on the network. Every stablecoin will be backed by a reserve of assets and short-term government securities in order to preserve their value, Libra Association vice-chairman Dante Disparte explained in an interview. 

That doesn’t mean that the Libra coin will be abandoned, though. David Marcus, the co-creator of Facebook’s crypto project, said that the Libra Coin (LBR) will now be a Move smart contract that will figuratively “stitch” together fixed nominal weights of underlying stablecoins. 

This type of model, he explained, would make it closer to central banks and public institutions.

The public could be seeing stablecoins backed by the U.S. Dollar, the British Pound, and the Singapore Dollar, according to the published whitepaper. 

The type of coins being issued on the network isn’t the only change coming to Libra. 

Marcus announced on Twitter that more than 90% of the funding for the Libra Association now comes from its members, which include Uber, Lyft, Zapo, Shopify, Coinbase, and Andreessen Horowitz. Less than 10% of the association’s funding currently comes from Facebook, he explained. 

Another notable evolution in Libra’s general plan is its introduction of detailed rules and regulations regarding user privacy. According to Marcus, the association introduced a comprehensive network-level system around anti-money laundering (AML), Combating the Financing of Terrorism (CFT), and sanction enforcement regulations. 

The network’s originally planned transition from a permission to a permissionless form of governance has also been abandoned in favor of a market-driven open and competitive network. It still remains unclear whether or not control of the network will remain with the members of the associations once Libra evolves further. 

It isn’t all that far-fetched to assume that the members of the Libra Association, which used to include industry giants Visa and PayPal that have left the consortium due to regulatory concerns, will be taking over the majority of the control on the network. Marcus himself praised the remaining members for “stepping up in a big way” and “increasing its independence.