Paypal CEO talks Libra exit in an interview on Fortune. Paypal CEO Dan Schulman spoke to Fortune reporters yesterday on a variety of topics. He explained the exit from the Libra association. He also spoke about cryptocurrencies and his take on their future.
Schulman also spoke about the possible future of paypal with blockchain and cryptocurrency. He specifically did not go into details because he claimed that he was protecting the interests of the company. He didn’t want to take away any competitive advantage of the project. When asked if it is competing with Libra he said no. He claimed that the paypal blockchain project will be a different and broader technology than Libra.
Schulman is also a bitcoin HODLER. He has no other cryptocurrency except bitcoin. He also had this to say about the blockchain
We think there’s a lot of promise to blockchain technology. It’s intriguing to us, but it really needs to do something that the traditional rails can’t do. Most people think that blockchain is about efficiency, but the system today is pretty efficient. There are middlemen sometimes in between, but the rails of it are pretty efficient. So we think a lot of the neat stuff that can happen on blockchain is around identity, for example.
It’s about the applications on top of it, not necessarily using it to lower the cost by one-eighth of one eighth of a fraction. By the way, if it does turn out to be a lower-cost infrastructure, all of us will move to it.
Paypal CEO talks Libra exit among other topics related to cryptocurrency.
From the Interview
FORTUNE: Why did you decide to withdraw from The Libra Association?
When David Marcus [Facebook’s head of Libra] came to talk to us about Libra initially, he framed it in ways that were appealing to us about financial inclusion. We’re always exploring the next generation of technologies — like blockchain infrastructure to do things more efficiently. And you know, we’d like to learn more about it. All of us were interested in learning more. As we learned more about [Libra] and saw the amount of things that were still left to do and the amount of things we still had to do on our own roadmap outside of Libra, we said, “You know, we think if we focus on our own roadmap, we’d be able to advance financial inclusion faster than if we put all these resources against Libra.”
It wasn’t an acrimonious divorce or anything like that. It’s just that they will start going down a road that we’re very interested in looking at and monitoring, and maybe later, there are ways we can work together. I wish them the best of luck on it.
Was it because you were spooked by the regulatory scrutiny?
Regulatory and compliance, for us, is foundational. But we have an extremely robust relationship with every regulator out there. We are extremely trusted on that. That wasn’t really what spooked us on it. It was just about, “Where do we want to put our attention, and what do we want to do today to advance our mission?” Once they start figuring things out, we’ll take another look at where they are.
