Bison Trails launches QT protocol to help developers build on Libra

Blockchain technology and staking service provider Bison Trail has announced the launch of its Query and Transactions Clusters, or QT, protocol to help developers build on Facebook’s forthcoming Libra network.

Libra QT offers a bridge between Libra’s pre-mainnet and off-chain systems, allowing dedicated off-chain infrastructure to read and write data to the blockchain.

According to a Nov. 25 announcement from Bison Trails, which provides blockchain services and infrastructure to crypto companies, “Libra QT offers fully-managed, dedicated, and highly resilient Libra read/write nodes and supporting systems without the hassle and expense of running them in-house.” Bison Trails’ co-founder and chief technical officer, Aaron Henshaw, said:

“Libra QT is a core part of our product offering for the Libra ecosystem. It allows people building on top of Libra to securely and easily integrate their exchanges and wallets, and build new and exciting applications.”

Developers can use Bison Trails’ Libra QT to build wallets, exchanges and other virtual asset services on Libra’s pre-mainnet. Bison Trails is a founding member of the Libra Association. 

Libra QT also enables payment processing, transaction validations and specialized use cases like smart contract authoring and market-making.

Since facing stiff regulatory push-back in 2019, the Libra Association has stepped away from the media spotlight to redesign the project — garnering little attention since announcing former HSBC, Credit Suisse and Santander executive Ian Jenkins as its chief financial officer and chief risk officer last month.

In a recent interview, crypto skeptic David Gerard, who has written a book on Libra, described the “uniformity” of the exclusionary response from international regulators to Libra as “amazing,” noting that lawmakers across the world immediately threw up barriers to the project and set about fortifying existing legislation to protect against “global stablecoins.”

Gerard believes that the threat of global “Libra-ization” was too great for regulators to ignore, with Libra posing challenges to the sovereignty of monetary policy.

“It’s like dollarization, which is the word for when a country’s economy is totally overtaken by US dollars. [...] Libra-ization could happen the same way — that would be quite bad, because while the US dollar is maintained by the Federal Reserve for US interests […] there is some sort of public service aspect to dollarization.”

The Libra association has expanded its membership to 30 this year, including the addition of leading DLT venture capital firm, Blockchain Capital, and major e-commerce firms Shopify and Checkout.com.