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If you dig into the documentation they've released so far, you'll find that it explicitly addresses this (I also am in the "No Facebook-owned Services" camp, so I went digging for the answer.) There are two subsidiary organizations: first, the Libra Association, which is the governance organization populated by the "validators", i.e. the corporate partners who ponied up the $10MM entry fee. The second is Calibra, the engineering arm spun off of Facebook itself, which is developing all of the bits and pieces that make up this technology. This includes the endpoints, client software, node servers, and so on. Neither of these subsidiaries requires a Facebook account to interact with (although it's unlikely any of us will interact with the former, realistically); this is explicitly stated in the FAQ on the Calibra page, where it states that you can interact with the payment ecosystem using the (forthcoming) wallet software directly. With that being said, they will also be integrating it nicely with Messenger and WhatsApp; this is likely where the majority of users will interact with it, which provides a nice front-end (the screenshots look very similar to Apple Pay). Thus, if you need a long, unwieldy, or hard-to-surface address to send assets with the Calibra wallet, or if FB users can't easily target a wallet address for payment, then you're still facing a usability barrier, if not a technical one. I'm not sure if there's much a difference between the two, honestly, beyond the semantic one. Furthermore, there's absolutely no guarantees that this won't change over time - I could absolutely see FB bringing the pressure down on Calibra to play within the garden, so to speak. We'll have to wait and see what implementations actually appear, not just what they've announced on Day 1. |