I always think of eBay as a scavenger hunt type of site which is totally unfair. I know that. I apologize.
But one of the things that I admire about eBay is the wisdom of their acquisition of PayPal back in 2002.
Back in 2002, eBay bought PayPal for $1.5B which turned a lot of heads. Wow! Unicorn meat! How do you cook it?
On Friday afternoon, four additional cracks appeared in the Libra Foundation when Visa, MasterCard, eBay, and Stripe joined the earlier refugee from Libra, PayPal, and announced they were going to take a pass on joining and funding the Libra Foundation, headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland.
What was odd was the revelation that Libra had been taking a lot of incoming from governments — United States, Germany, France — including a letter from Senator Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) and Senator Brian Schatz (D-Hi).
They had written directly to Visa, Mastercard, and Stripe discouraging their participation as well as warning of a “high level of scrutiny from regulators not only on Libra-related payment activities, but on all payment activities.”
Some time ago, we spoke about Facebook’s Libra cryptocurrency.
We spoke of it here:
Recently, we learned that PayPal has abandoned ship as one of the 28 founding Libra Association members. Sort of caught folks by surprise.
They didn’t give a reason, but mumbled along the lines of this:
Uhhh, ummm, we have decided “to forgo further participation in the Libra Association at this time and to continue to focus on advancing our existing mission and business priorities as we strive to democratize access to financial services for underserved populations.”
The Financial Times said that PayPal was concerned about the regulatory lightning Libra seems to be attracting.
Zelle? WTF is Zelle, Big Red Car? You got some ‘splaining to do, Big Red.
Big Red Car here on the edge of a new dawn in the ATX. [Drama queen is the Big Red Car.]
One of my favorite notions is the idea that a startup “disrupts” a legacy industry or business and then expects the legacy old folks to lay there and just take it. Silly rabbit!
The legacy brethren didn’t get to be the approved solution by being dummies. They may not be lean, nimble, and agile, but they can rent that talent.
WTF are you talking about Big Red Car?
Nowhere does it seem more obvious that the legacy tribe is not going to give up their franchise than in FINTECH.
So, let me tell you the story of PayPal v Zelle.
Thank you for subscribing.
Something went wrong.