Facebook's cryptocurrency project is losing valuable financial partners. New blow for Libra, Facebook's digital currency project, scheduled for mid-2020: Friday evening, key partners, credit card issuers Visa and Mastercard, the e-commerce platform eBay, and payment services Stripe and Mercado Pago have announced that they are disengaging. And this a week after PayPal, another precious ally. The Libra association, which oversees the cryptocurrency project, is due to bring together its founding members this Monday in Geneva, to sign a definitive charter. These defections come as Facebook, the world's largest social network, is facing virulent criticism from both regulators and politicians. All point to its excesses in the management of personal data, or even the fact that Libra could be used for money laundering. Just like PayPal, the four outgoing news confirm their support for the guiding ideas of the project. "We will continue our evaluation and our final decision will be determined by a number of factors, including the association's ability to fully meet regulators' expectations," Visa said in a statement. The threat of regulators seems to have played for these defections. “If you stay with the project, you can expect intense regulatory scrutiny not just of Libra-related payment activity, but of all of your payment activity,” Brian Schatz and Sherrod Brown, two US senators, in a letter to Stripe, Visa and Mastercard, published by The Verge site. The Libra association finds itself de facto without major payment specialists among its members: it will therefore no longer be able to count on a global player to help consumers convert their currencies into Libra and to facilitate transactions. The other members of the association, including Lyft, Vodafone and Iliad, are mainly made up of private equity firms, telecom groups, blockchain specialists or associations. “I don't think Facebook can carry out this project on its own, without the arrival of a large bank like JPMorgan,” Michael Pachter, an analyst at Wedbush Securities, recently indicated on Bloomberg TV. “The composition of the association may change over time, but its founding principles (…) ensure the resilience of the Libra payment network”, reacted Dante Disparte, of the Libra association, on Friday.