Abstract

The official launch of the Libra project in 2019, and the subsequent troubles experienced by the project, stimulated a vigorous debate, from different perspectives, on the pros and cons of a private currency with global ambitions. This paper describes the main characteristics of Libra and locates it in a partial but clear taxonomy of the increasingly crowded field of so-called «digital currencies». In the light of the regulatory problems that will arise, this paper also aims to assess the impact of this project on a crucial feature of the economic system that helped shape the institutional structure of modernity: the power to create money.