Ethereum Co-Founder on Facebook Libra: “A Centralized Wolf in a Decentralized Sheep’s Clothing”

Ethereum co-founder Joseph Lubin is the latest critics on the centralization concern of Facebook’s Libra coin. Published in the Quartz’s blogpost, Lubin claimed Facebook libra coin is “a centralized wolf in a decentralized sheep’s clothing”.

While Lubin predicted that there will be two billion Libra users in a few years and the user experience on crypto will be vastly improved, he is concerned with the centralization issue of Libra coin. Lubin believed that Libra coin does not eliminate the needs for subjective trust, which people are confident that Libra will eventually turn into a more permissionless and decentralized system. Users also have to trust Libra’s underlying assets (fiat currencies and government bonds) as backing. Furthermore, merchants need to trust the initial network of 28 firms to responsibly run nodes in validating transactions in the system.

Apart from centralization concerns, Lubin claimed that ConsenSys has already analyzed the code of Libra, which borrowed a lot of ideas from Ethereum. He expected Libra will be well-executed from technical perspectives.