Facebook has signed up more than a dozen companies — including Visa, PayPal, and Uber — to back the new cryptocurrency that will be unveiled next week, The Wall Street Journal reported.
According to the Journal, the financial firms and e-commerce companies will invest around $10 million each in a consortium that will govern the digital coin. The money would be used to fund the creation of the coin, which will be pegged to a basket of government-issued currencies to avoid the wild swings that have dogged other cryptocurrencies, the Journal reported, citing unnamed sources.
The Journal previously reported online merchants were looking to raise around $1 billion for an effort aimed at a digital coin that users could send each other — and use to make purchases both on Facebook and across the Internet.
It has been a decade since bitcoin was born, yet consumers hardly use it or the hundreds of other cryptocurrencies to pay for things. Facebook is betting it can change that with a crypto-based payments system built around its giant social network and its billions of users, the Journal reported.
Credit card companies have long worried some big tech giant could muscle into their business, and participating in the project lets them keep an eye on Facebook's ambitions while sharing in the upside should the project gain traction with consumers, the Journal reported.
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