Canadian e-commerce platform Shopify has joined the Libra Association, the governing council for the Facebook-founded LibraLibra stablecoin. It joins companies including Coinbase, Spotify and PayU as a member of the non-profit organization, which manages the Libra blockchain as well as running validator nodes on its network.

Libra, a stablecoinstablecoin backed by a basket of real-world assets, was developed by Facebook subsidiary Calibra in a bid to provide the world's 1.7 billion unbanked with access to financial services.

"We spend a lot of our time thinking about how to make commerce better in parts of the world where money and banking could be far better," wrote Shopify in a blog post announcing the news. "As a member of the Libra Association, we will work collectively to build a payment network that makes money easier to access and supports merchants and consumers everywhere."

As part of its mission to "empower more entrepreneurs around the world," Shopify stated that it supported "transparent fees and easy access to capital, and ensuring the security and privacy of our merchants’ customer data."

Vodafone out, Shopify in

Libra has had a rocky start, with politicians and regulators from around the world queuing up to raise concerns about the cryptocurrency. Several founding members of the Libra Association have abandoned the project, including Stripe, eBay and Mastercard, and most recently Vodafone, which quit the project to focus on mobile payments platform M-Pesa.

In September last year, Libra confirmed that it plans to launch in the second half of 2020, and recently appointed a "steering committee" to oversee the project's technical development.