Welcome back. It's great to be with you again. My name is James Panicki. I'm Emlex's Asia-Pacific

Senior Editor, and this is our weekly chat on regulatory affairs featuring members of our reporting team

around the world. Now Libra is in The Ascendant at the moment. The Facebook-backed digital

currency and payment system was announced last year and has been the talk of financial services

boardrooms ever since. Of course, Facebook is no stranger to

conversations about the limitations of regulation, but usually those conversations occur with

the object of the regulation already up and running. This time, the debate is moving much

faster and it's forward-looking, particularly in Europe. And that's bad news for the digital

currency, which has recently been renamed DM. Today we're going to tease out the issue of how

the cryptocurrencies can expect to be regulated both globally and in Europe specifically.

And we'll see how this discussion is reverberating when it comes

to payment networks in the context of a uniquely European challenge to the visas, maestroes, and

master cards of this world. Fiona Maxwell is an M-Lex Financial Services correspondent in London,

and she has been following this issue with her usual

panache, and she joins us now. Now, Fiona, before we start, for those of us less familiar with

the terminology, firstly, tell us what Libre is and also what we mean by central bank digital

currencies or CBDCs, which are now very much part of

this discussion. Hi James. Thanks. So essentially both are forms of electronic money as opposed to

physical cash. So Libra is a private initiative. It's led by Facebook. And then central bank digital currencies,

as the name suggests, are an e-money initiative being looked at by central banks. So generally

Libra is described as a stable coin, which can generally be defined as a cryptocurrency,

but with a potential for less price volatility,

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