Facebook’s Libra loses another member company, this time telecom giant Vodafone

The British telecom giant Vodafone is leaving the Libra Association, the governing body behind Facebook’s troubled global digital currency initiative. Vodafone is the eighth major financial services organization to part ways with the association.

Representatives of both Facebook and Vodafone confirmed the move to the cryptocurrency news site CoinDesk on Tuesday.

Regulators in the U.S. and Europe have expressed serious concerns about Libra, most of them related to the fact that Facebook, with its troubled record on user data privacy, is behind the endeavor. That seems to have been enough to send PayPal, Mastercard, Visa, Mercado Pago, eBay, Stripe and Booking Holdings rushing for the exits.

However, Vodafone said that it was not regulatory concerns that drove its decision to depart Libra, but rather a desire to develop its own service. The conglomerate says it intends to put the resources it originally planned for Libra into its own M-Pesa digital payment service, which it plans to expand beyond the six African countries in which it’s now available.