The Coming Revolution

The rise of CBDCs both promises and threatens to entirely remake Africa's monetary landscape

Origins

It’s hard to imagine now, but there once was a company called Facebook. Before it became declared Meta, in 2019, it promised to issue in a global currency revolution. That year it announced Libra, which would be a tokenized basket of major global currencies that would be capitalized by every major card network(VISA/Mastercard/Amex/etc) as well as leading global and regional banks + major fintech companies. Through Facebook and WhatsApp Zuckerberg hoped that it would become a master cryptocurrency that would unlock a global payments revolution. It would enrich the entire consortium of companies involved by a huge measure and represent the triumph of the private sector over the public state.

The aftermath of that short beautiful dream by Mark Zuckerberg was swift and brutal. National states fought back. American regulators declared that they would investigate the very concept, inviting talks of antitrust legislation within the halls of Congress. In Europe the ECB and the European Commission quickly declared that the Libra plan was a no go and that it would need to be remade from the ground up with complete governmental consent. Eventually the public storm of dissent from both American and European regulators ended Mark Zuckerberg’s dream, leading to the project being entirely abandoned in early 2022. Money was clearly a step too far for the dreamers of Silicon Valley, the last preserve of neoliberal states that weren’t interested in its privatization. By 2021 Facebook had turned into Meta, a sign that if physical reality and currencies couldn’t be transformed, perhaps it was better to focus entirely on the digital world.