NextBillion - An Initiative of the William Davidson Institute at the University of Michigan

Monday, November 25, 2019

By Paulina Marinova

When Facebook’s ambitious cryptocurrency project Libra launched in June, a total of 28 companies signed on to be part of The Libra Association. The consortium of companies, including PayPal, Visa, MasterCard, and Coinbase, would help build and operate services around the project.

In October, PayPal became the first company to walk away from The Libra Association without citing a specific reason, only that it decided “to forgo further participation in the Libra Association at this time and to continue to focus on advancing our existing mission and business priorities as we strive to democratize access to financial services for underserved populations.”

Last week, PayPal CEO Dan Schulman stopped by Fortune’s offices to meet with several reporters and editors. We spoke about a wide variety of subjects — so wide, in fact, that I learned he does martial arts in the morning and his resting heart rate is 48 beats per minute. (Compare that with mine, which is a coffee-fueled 71. 💀)

But my questions focused on PayPal’s relationship with Libra and the company’s own work in the cryptocurrency realm. Here’s what Schulman said.

Photo courtesy of Pixabay.