PayPal为何退出Libra？首席执行官揭示原因
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今年6月，当Facebook推出加密货币Libra的宏大计划时，共有28家公司签署协议成为Libra协会成员，其中包括PayPal、Visa、万事达卡及Coinbase等知名企业。协会创立的初衷是为Libra项目的建设与运营提供帮助。 今年10月，PayPal成为Libra协会成员中首家宣布退出的企业，但并未说明其退出的具体原因，仅表示其决定“放弃进一步参与Libra协会，将继续聚焦主业，为实现普惠金融、服务更多民众而不懈努力。” 最近，PayPal的首席执行官丹·舒尔曼造访《财富》杂志编辑部，并与数名记者、编辑举行了会谈。我们谈天说地，无所不聊，甚至连舒尔曼早起练武术、静息心率48下这种事情都没有落下。（作为比较，靠咖啡续命的我静息心率是71下。） 但我问的最多的还是PayPal与Libra的关系，以及PayPal在加密货币领域里的进展。以下为对话实录。 《财富》：为什么决定退出Libra协会？ 丹·舒尔曼：大卫·马库斯（Facebook的Libra项目主管）刚来找我们时谈了很多Libra在普惠金融领域的作用，我们很感兴趣。我们一直在探索能够提升效率的下一代技术，比如区块链技术。你知道，我们的求知欲很强，当然希望对Libra有更多的了解。然而，随着对其认识的不断加深，我们发现Libra还有很多工作有待完成，我们也有很多计划中与Libra项目无关的工作要做。所以我们当时就说：“与其把所有的资源都投入到Libra项目里，我们更应该关注自身的发展方向，这样才能够更快地推进普惠金融。” 跟两夫妻吵得不可开交闹离婚不一样，Libra将会在一条我们感兴趣的道路上前行，而我们会以旁观者的身份去观察他们的进展，以后说不定也会有某种形式的合作。衷心祝愿他们一切都好。 是因为担心监管审查么？ 监管与合规是我们的立足之本。我们与监管机构的关系都极为紧密，他们也极为信任我们。所以我们关注的倒不是监管，而是“把注意力放在哪？需要做些什么才能够实现目标？”等他们想明白了，再看情况。 今年早些时候，PayPal的首席财务官约翰·雷尼表示，公司有团队正在开展与区块链与加密货币相关的工作。可以分享一些他们的工作情况么？ 有些可以，但有些东西因为涉及到竞争，还得保密。 会跟Libra有竞争么？ 不一定。只是竞争优势问题。比如说，你可能会问有关下一个产品或下一笔收购的问题。这两个问题我可能都无法回答。 我们认为区块链前景是非常光明的。对我们也很有吸引力，但需要它为我们带来些不一样的东西。很多人觉得区块链的价值在于效率，但现有体系效率其实已经很高。虽然有时还需要中间商，但体系本身的效率并无问题。我们认为区块链的很多优势源于其“数字身份”的特性。 比如，数字身份的应用，而不一定是能够降低已经没有压缩空间的成本。顺便说一下，如果区块链真能够降低成本，我们都会支持它。 在加密货币方面，因为商家利润很薄，而加密货币的价格波动又很大，所以现在对它还没有太多需求。还有就是要能够实现加密货币与法币的快速兑换，但兑换也要收费，这样降下来的成本也都被转换费用吃掉。只有加密货币的币值稳定，才有可能为广大网络商家所接受，这里的“商家”可不是暗网上的那批不法分子，而是正经的网络商家。 我不是说加密货币这个主意没有意义，可以看到很多人都在交易加密货币。现在的加密货币更像是商品而不是货币。但是我们也可以看到，与许多国家和地区的货币相比，加密货币的表现更为稳定。 你自己持有虚拟货币么？ 有的，比特币。 只有比特币么？ 是的。 （财富中文网） 译者：梁宇 审校：夏林 |
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. FORTUNE: Why did you decide to withdraw from The Libra Association? Dan Schulman: 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. Earlier this year, PayPal’s CFO John Rainey said the company had teams working on blockchain and cryptocurrency. Can you share a little more about what they’re working on? Yes and no. Some of this is competitive, and we don’t really want to … Is it competitive with Libra? No, it’s not necessarily competitive with Libra. It’s just a competitive advantage. Like, you might ask what’s our next product that’s coming out or what’s our next acquisition. I probably can’t tell you about those either. 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. On the crypto side, it’s still very volatile, and therefore, we don’t have much demand for it by merchants because merchants operate on very small margins. And what they have to do is immediately turn it into fiat, and there’s a fee for turning it into fiat, so any advantage in cost is typically eaten up by that conversion fee. Until it becomes less volatile, it won’t be a currency that is widely accepted by merchants on the web — not the dark web, but the web. That doesn’t mean that I don’t think crypto is an interesting idea and that people are trading it quite a bit. It’s more commodity-like than it is cash-like right now. But you can think of use cases in different countries and different places where it can be more stable than the alternatives. Do you personally own any cryptocurrencies? Yes. Bitcoin. Only Bitcoin? Only. Yes. |
