MIT Fellow Says Facebook ‘Lifted’ His Ideas for Libra Cryptocurrency

Avid students of the literature on monetary innovation might feel deja vu when reading Facebook’s Libra white paper.

Several aspects of the social network’s much-ballyhooed global cryptocurrency project uncannily resemble the vision laid out in a paper published last year in the Royal Society’s Open Science publication.   

For example, the Libra paper described a digital coin that would maintain its value because it was backed by a basket of fiat currencies and short-term debt. This echoed the July 2018 paper by MIT big-hitters Alex Lipton, Thomas Hardjono and Alex “Sandy” Pentland, who described an asset-backed, supra-national digital token. (To be sure, the assets in their proposal were commodities like oil or crops).

Continuing the similarities, Libra Association, a group of 27 financial, tech and VC companies tentatively committed to Facebook’s project, carried a whiff of the hypothetical consortium governing Tradecoin. Both proposed coins were…