Washington (AFP)

The prerequisite for launching stable cryptocurrencies, like Facebook's Libra, is "a solid legal basis," a report sent Thursday to G7 countries in Washington.

This report, drawn up under the leadership of the Executive Board member of the European Central Bank, Benoît Coeuré, does not quote at any time the Libra that the social network wants to launch in 2020.

But it had been ordered in July at the previous G7 Finance in France, shortly after the announcement of the Facebook project. The ministers then sounded the alarm on the potential risks of these digital currencies such as tax evasion or the financing of terrorism.

"For developers of stable money", that is to say, backed by a basket of currencies such as the dollar or the euro to guarantee stability, "a solid legal basis in all the jurisdictions concerned (...) is an absolute prerequisite ", write the authors of the report.

In addition, they encourage central banks and ministries to "develop road maps to improve efficiency and reduce the cost of payments and financial services".

Because "as a whole, cross-border payments remain slow, expensive and opaque, especially for retail payments such as cash transfers," they note.

In addition, 1.7 billion people around the world have little or no access to financial services, which explains the emergence of digital currencies.

The digital currency must thus offer an alternative payment method to traditional banking circuits that are not always efficient.

But many regulators and governments point for many months for many risks including the bad reputation of the US group in terms of confidentiality and protection of personal data.

In addition to the risks of tax evasion and the financing of terrorism, there is a "systemic risk", also considers the report submitted to the G7.

States and central banks also fear losing their sovereignty: they are for the moment the only ones to have the right to coin money.

- Allow Libra or not?

France, which presides this year the G7, plans to publish a statement at the end of this meeting, told AFP a source close to the file.

Last month, his Minister of the Economy Bruno Le Maire did not hesitate to pronounce for a ban of the "development of the Libra on the European soil".

Thursday, he returned to the charge in a column published in the Financial Times claiming that the cryptocurrency of Faceboook was "a threat to the sovereignty of states."

Yves Mersch, a member of the executive board of the ECB, has also recently estimated that the Libra could harm the monetary policy of the euro area and the single currency.

In the United States, Lael Brainard, a member of the board of directors of the Fed, in a speech on digital currencies in Washington, issued Wednesday a long list of regulatory challenges facing issuers of digital currencies.

The G7 Finance meeting and Brainard's statements come a week before Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg testifies before a finance commission in the House of Representatives on October 23.

Zuckerberg was already Thursday in Washington to participate in discussions on freedom of expression.

For its part, China, which is not part of the G7 and who decided two years ago to put cryptocurrencies on the index, accelerates the preparations for its own virtual currency.

The association Libra, which must manage the future virtual currency desired by Facebook, was officially launched Monday by 21 founding members in Geneva including PayU, telecommunications groups Vodafone and Iliad, Uber platforms and Spotify, blockchain actors like Anchorage or Coinbase, venture capital funds like Andreessen Horowitz or non-profit organizations like Kiva.

However, the project was recently weakened by the defection of Paypal, Visa, Mastercard or eBay.

© 2019 AFP