E-Commerce Giant Shopify Joins Libra Association

Digital commerce platform Shopify has joined the Libra Association.

The company announced the move in a blog post Friday, becoming the latest member of the Facebook-founded stablecoin developer. Shopify joins roughly a month after Vodafone pulled out of the organization to focus on its own digital payments system. This is the first new member of the organization since its formation four months ago.

Shopify said in its blog post it intends to "work collectively" to build a payment network that works "everywhere."

Libra was unveiled by Facebook last summer as a global payments project, with a stablecoin backed by a basket of fiat currencies. The Libra Association, a governing council for the project, was founded in October, decentralizing leadership of the stablecoin on paper. Facebook itself is not on the council, though its subsidiary Calibra is.

Other members include Coinbase, Xapo, Anchorage, Bison Trails, Creative Destruction Lab, Andreessen Horowitz, Thrive Capital, Ribbit Capital, Union Square Ventures, Illiad, Farfetch, Uber, Lyft, Kiva, Mercy Corps, Women’s World Banking, Spotify, PayU and Mark Zuckerberg's Breakthrough Initiatives.

Visa, Mastercard, PayPal, Booking Holdings, eBay, Stripe and Mercado Pago were originally meant to be part of the project but withdrew before the council was formed. Vodafone remained a member until January.

"Our mission has always been to support the entrepreneurial journey of the more than one million merchants on our platform. That means advocating for transparent fees and easy access to capital, and ensuring the security and privacy of our merchants’ customer data. We want to create an infrastructure that empowers more entrepreneurs around the world," Shopify's blog post said.

The blog post said a large part of the world's existing financial infrastructure was not built to scale sufficiently for the needs of internet commerce.

In a statement, Libra Association head of policy and communications Dante Disparte said the group was "proud" to welcome its new, and now 21st member.

"As a multinational commerce platform with over one million businesses in approximately 175 countries, Shopify, Inc., brings a wealth of knowledge and expertise to the Libra project. Shopify joins an active group of Libra Association members committed to achieving a safe, transparent, and consumer-friendly implementation of a global payment system that breaks down financial barriers for billions of people," he said.