Libra Association has announced that Singaporean sovereign wealth fund Temasek is one of the newest members to join its proposed cryptocurrency project.
Paradigm and Slow Ventures were also named as new members of the Geneva-based association.
Both headquartered in San Francisco, Paradigm is a crypto investment firm and Slow Ventures is a venture capital business that has backed companies including Slack, Postmates, and Airtable.
“The addition of three new members to the Libra Association, shows our commitment to building a diverse group of organizations that will contribute to the governance, technological roadmap and launch readiness for the Libra payment system,” said Dante Disparte, vice chairman and head of policy and communications for the Libra Association.
“We are honoured to welcome Temasek, Paradigm, and Slow Ventures to this effort. Each of these organisations shares our overall mission alignment bringing unique capabilities and long term focus on market development for blockchain and digital assets.”
Must read: Told you so: Facebook’s Libra cryptocurrency is a bad idea (and now its partners know it, too)
The three companies will join existing members including Shopify, Tagomi, and Heifer Interaction.
The addition of Temasek also aligns with Facebook’s reported plans to bundle the Singapore dollar, Japanese yen, British pound, euro, and US dollar as its first bunch of currencies to back Libra.
Mastercard, Visa, eBay, Stripe, and Paypal who were some of the consortium’s initial members, all dropped out of the Libra payments network last year, following worldwide scrutiny by regulators about Facebook’s lacklustre approach to security and privacy for the project.
US lawmakers had expressed widespread mistrust of Facebook’s cryptocurrency plan, saying the company’s attempt at entering into financial services was troubling due to its “pattern of failing to keep consumer data private”, having branded it as a “serious concern”.
Read more: Facebook’s Zuckerberg questioned on Libra, political ads, and online pornography
Similarly, France previously moved to block Facebook’s Libra cryptocurrency from being established in Europe, fearing it posed a risk to consumers.
Meanwhile, regulators from Australia, UK, and Canada have jointly called on Facebook to provide further information on its Libra project, particularly around how it was going to ensure it could secure and protect personal information.
The group asked the company to answer a slew of questions, such as: “How can global data protection and privacy enforcement authorities be confident that the Libra Network has robust measures to protect the personal information of network users?”
When Libra was initially announced, Facebook said it planned for the cryptocurrency project to be launched sometime this year.
