We will be active in payments services, congresswoman, and enable all of these people who dont have access modern Payment Systems to move their money around and have access to World Economy and will be in the payments business, as far as colibra wallet. Let in ask you another question on governance. In your open statement you said it would nothing be overpowered by facebook because you would only have one vote. So, in the world of banking, because in my mind its still banking, were dealing with a lot of banks who merged so lets sea with your one vote you would buy stripe or you would buy spotify. Would that now just give you the one vote or guff you more control . Because we know these things merge and get bought out all the time. So if you bought to the things would that give you more power. It would not, congresswoman, because in the way that the governance is currently structured no one entity can have more than one voice or one percent of the vote. So let me go to someone asked bit the training and Financial Literacy. We know those who are unbanked or underbanked are that for a rope. This is very complicate. The best mind here on both side and clearly thats a lot of unkansassed questions and you can tell from our questions theres a lot of disagreement with this. How do you take somebody from any district who i underbanked or unbanked and educate them. No Financial Literacy and they think youre a bank because even when you mention paypal and those systems which you their president of dish use paypal as a store owner but tied to my credit card, it was tied to the regulations of the federal government. So, how do you tell us that its not banking . Because if its not tied to any of those things, how does it work . Congress com where is my protection . What happens if do this and we already know im ignorant and then i want my libras back. Can i get them all back . Yes. With no problems, i can get them back. Yes in the same way that paypal and others are connected the Banking System my time is up. I yield back. Thank you. The gentleman from texas, mr. Williams, is recognized for five minutes. Thank you, madam chair. I want to echo the comments that thats hearing seems premature so far private companies are beginning to form an association. We talk but a 12page white paper described in the general idea of this global cryptocurrency. Theres a lot more work to be done internally at libra before we and congress can examine to all the hurdles were concern but that you hear from both sides. Many more processing the pressing issues we need deal with before we go home for the august reassess. We havent acted on the impending debt ceiling the reckless government spending, still no budget deal no xm authorization bill that has businesses all over the country nervous and were the beginning of Hurricane Season and cant get the Flood Insurance package to a vote on the floor. I understand the interest is in this idea but our time would be much better spent on issued that will benefit the American People immediately rather a hand trying to stop this idea from being explored by facebook and other industry participant. We should not discourage the private sector. We should not discourage the private sector investing their own time and money to research new tech knock. No matter what policies we enact the private sector is the engine that creates solutions to some of the great problems and mr. Marcus i applaud your entrepreneurial spirit and it leads know believe youre probably capitalist, are you not . Thats a yes or no. I believe we all are in this country. Thats good. Helps our record the. And also so with that in mind would you believe that the private sector rather than the government is better sueded to consider the potential of block kahne technology in the Financial Services space. I believe in this pick case, it requires both the innovation capabilities of the private sector and the oversight of the government and regulatory buddies for this project to be successful. To facebook already stated i wont launch the cryptocurrency in india due to regulatory issues. Can you explain the issues in india and do you anticipate you will not be able to launch this project other countries. Congressman, there will be countries in the which the colibra wallet itself will not be able to operate. But since the network is interoperable and other wallets can emerge in different regions and transactions are possible between wallets, unlike the Current System which constrains transactions within one wallet, we believe that others will emerge and other countries that will enable access to greater number of people who dont have access to modern Financial Services. Something i saw in your white paper is that Libra Association will be run as a nonprofit. Yet ill will pay dividends to investors who provide capital to jump start the ecosystem. Can you go into greater detail on how you reconcile the negotiation being a nonforecast yet you will pay dividends to the investors. Yes, congressman. The association is a nonprofit membership based association under the laws of switzerland that are slightly different. With that being said, if and the goal force the association is not to generate a property but if it has to pay out income streams it will pay taxes on those income streams as covered by the swiss law. As a Small Business owner im a main street america guy. 50 years in business if see the benefit on remittans payments to other countries and with the lowering traction s satisfies costs so theres no reason we should stop the idea. With that being said i get concern if the were going to be used in lending. Is the eventual goal use cryptocurrency for lending . Congressman, as far as the he colibra wallet is concern it doesnt have any plans to do so. As of now. I do believe that there might be banks around the world that might want to engage in those types of services but this is the province of banks and not something that the colibra wallet will do itself and is not in the plans right now. Real quick. The white paper states the libra allows you to hold one or more addresses not linked to their real world identity. How will you strike the correct balance between the privacy and the years able to hide criminal activities. Im glad you asked this question because i think this is misunderstood. The fact theres no personally identifiable information on the block kahne is not virtue of the fact that people are not identified on the flat iter. Just it would be irresponsible to have personal data possibly available. That being said while its on and off ramps will be regulated. Yield my time back. Thank you for being here today. The gentleman from guam was also the cries chair for the committee on finance services, recognized for five minutes. Thank you, madam chair. Mr. Marcus, what the Organization Project average user will have as a libra balance . Congressman, we have not projected average babies dental balances thats week you you expect me to believe that . Fibs builds on the average number of hit, visa, mastercard, huge players are signing up and you have no idea how expect oh have in the average libra account. Congressman it will really vary denning wrong the usage of libra, the currency and the can you give me a low estimate and a high estimate of what the variation is expected to be. Congressman, with heat not made projections for this but we would be happy to follow up with your office and team when we do. First of all, im absolutely disbelieve that. Like i said those associations are built around understanding their users and what theyre anticipated their use wam will be and youre trying to hide that figure because when you do the math its very alarming. Y ore own posts you mentioned that bills of users billions of years. He we firmly believe is lieb brace successful can be a nonlinear step change for billions who need it the most. So talking about 100 in a libra account youre talking 100 billion. A thousand dollars in libra account, if youre talking about 10,000 in a libra account. And so i think that the amount that were talking about in terms of average user is critical in order to understand the full scope of how pervasive this kind of action is going to be and i want to go through why that so critical. You have 20 Founding Members. A lot of big shot companies that have come together, seem iing overnight and under the radar and the white paper you submitted says youll have 100 members and n the second half of 2020, which is a year from now. Thats 72 members. Youre going to triple your growing in one year and you dont even know what the average libra wallet will hold. Just going to pretend that figure is some unknown number but were going to bring in 72 new players. Are any of the new players fortune 500 companies. Yes, congressman. How are you able to convince visa and mastercard and new fortunate 500 companies to sign up to something without know the average user rate. I want to respect any say im not hiding anything. Im here responding truthfully to all the question is have with the information i have. Since by, i think we can all be sensible people and you wont get Huge Companies signing up if they dont understand what theyre signing up for. The reason why this is so critical when you have even facebook ablown in your own posts you said you have 90 million businesses on the facebook platform that are going to be able to attest how this will be something that is going to be an empowerment for businesses and thats the facebook platform. Not talking about 72 other companies lining up without any kind of idea how much theyre going to be getting involved with. And this is so important because talking about billions of users and tens or hundreds of dollars. Thats money thats getting suck out of the u. S. Financial system and being put into whatever this cabal is put together in terms plebe bra and colean bra. When the u. S. Military operations and national security. If that is going to be the case, how do we put a stop to . Lets say we have hundreds of millions of users in the u. S. , and they all put in thousands of their own dollars. How do we put a stop to it when the risk presented itself . If the risk relent itself, what happens then . If you think that the congress or the elected leaders are going to put a stop to it, when you have hundreds of millions of users in thousands of districts, it is going to be next to impossible politically do that. The gentleman from georgia is recognized for five minutes. Thank you, madam chair. Thank you for being here. It has been a long day. I want to thank you for not only your time being here, but the willingness to look at new ways of doing things. That has been the strength of our country. Quite frankly, i do not care for facebook. It is a nightmare for many of us in this position. I do not care for some of the filtering that is done. Suppressing some of our posts because of political content. You are private business. It is your right to do so. I do appreciate anyone who challenges the status quo to look for something new and a better way of doing it. We have concerns. I think this is a platform where we can address those concerns. We can begin a dialogue. What you are experiencing right now has been experienced through any innovator throughout history. The Washington Post in the early eight early 90 hundreds had an article entitled, man will never fly and should not. It went through all of the reasons why we should stop testing an airplane especially when you have two bicycle candidates in dayton, ohio when scientists could not. Thomas edison, there were dozens and dozens of articles written on how the lightbulb was dangerous if it was ever accomplished and would be a Public Health threat and should be stopped immediately. All of those ended up being great advancements that rightfully so, as regular did by government for those Public Safety and Health Benefit reasons that it could be done safely. The point is, we cannot demean these things until we actually look into them. I have concerns. Unless i am willing to ask the concerns, and i am willing to hear your answers, we are getting nowhere. One of the big concerns of mine, spending time in the i. T. Industry and Data Security is, cryptocurrency is used for illicit financing. Money laundering, terrorism, financing human trafficking, it is estimated criminals use cryptocurrency to steal 1. 7 billion from investors just last year. The that happened in in the United States. The treasury secretary is concerned libra can be used for these purposes. How can you assure us and the American People this is not going to be another illicit financing tool . Congressman, thank you. I share this concern. This is something i care about personally a great deal. Share the concern and this is actually something that i care about personally a great deal. I dont want the creation that we are working towards to be used for those type of purposes at all. And we believe that with the appropriate controls, with a proper a and l programs, a proper ky tea on and off ramps, that we will improve on the Current System. Theres a lot of illicit activities that are currently happening on our existing Financial System and i actually believe that with a combination of the right technology and ability for Law Enforcement and regulators to also have a view into some of the movements that we will improve on the efficacy of aml and counterterrorism funding programs. Some of the pushback weve gotten from Law Enforcement, ive been anadvocate for looking at block chain or the technology. A lot of folks here have a fear, some justifiable fear of crypto currencies. When you remove the stigma of crypto currency i think locke jane is a validtechnology we can look at for Data Security but we get pushback on the use of block chain. Have you had engagement with Law Enforcement on this and if so what are their thoughts, their concerns, their acceptability . How are you going to do that interface . We will continue to engage notably with the Treasury Department and notably the department that looks after moneylaundering and counterterrorism funding with undersecretary medical care and her team and also globally with a number of Law Enforcement and regulators. With the remaining time i have i have questions i could submit for the record but you basically, its going to be a global Payment System which is regulated as Central Banks are done. Pretty heavily regulated. Would it be appropriate for fsoc to the registry libra as systemically important as it should be . Its not for me to say we should regulate us but we been engaged not only fsoc but all the agencies under the fsoc umbrella and we will engage mostly in Payment Services but its not for us to determine. Thank you. The gentleman from massachusetts, miss presley is oversized for five minutes. Thank you german waters, i appreciate your leadership in returning this committee to its oversight role and i want to emphasize to you Mister Marcus and to my colleagues on both sides of the aisle the reason we are here today is oversight. Or more accurately the lack of oversight in this space. The fact that we have arrived this far along in the conversation without any regulatory guardrails to inform the development of this project on its face, just that fact alone is a problem. It is long past time we stop compromising on consumers privacy and the pursuit of profit. Whenconsumers wellbeing is on the line , echoing the sentiments of the gentleman from arkansas we cannot afford to simply trust, but not verify so thats what were here to do today. That is to verify. Mister marcus, yes, sir no sense my time is short, are you familiar with the content of facebooks press release announcing the launch of libra . I am congresswoman. Grade, at the end of your press release there is a disclaimer that states and i quote, these forwardlooking statements may differ maturely from actual results due to a variety of factors and uncertainties, many of which are beyond our control. Unquote. In it you go on to admit that this is all based on assumptions that you believe to be reasonable, unquote. As of the date of this press release. Chairwoman, i ask for unanimous consent to submit to the record facebooks press release announcing the launchof libra. Without objection, such as the order. Yes, sir no, would you trust your money with a company that essentially admits its just winging it . Congresswoman, i dont believe that is the case and this is why weve shared our white papers. Reclaiming my time. Disclaimer ends by saying that quote, you undertake no obligation to update these treatments as a result of new information or future events, unquote but again moving on, on the issue of under banking which is an issue this committee is very committed to addressing under the leadership of chairwoman waters, a representative was siding in a white paper would identify 1. 7 billion people globally who lack access to Financial Institutions. That is a lot of people. Of all adults who dont have Bank Accounts are living in just seven countries. Bangladesh, china, india, indonesia, mexico, nigeria and pakistan. Yes, sir no, are any of libras 27 Partner Organizations based in these countries . Not at this stage congresswoman but by the time we get to 100 members we hope to have a more representative slate of people that we want to serve. Mister marcus, do you believe as it has been claimed authentication is a reason many of these people dont have Bank Accounts . There are a number of issues but yes identity is an issue and a greater problem. The same bank report finds that two thirds of people who dont