Facebook's Libra loses one more member as its council becomes official

Booking Holdings, the owner of Booking.com, Kayak, OpenTable, Priceline and Agoda, has become the latest company to withdraw from the Libra digital coin project called Libra.

The sudden withdrawal of Booking Holdings overshadowed the official launch of the new cryptocurrency alliance, leaving the project with 21 out of 28 original supporters.

The reservation services company, which controls 41 percent of the online travel market, said it withdrew the same day it was supposed to formally participate in the project at a meeting in Geneva.

Booking Holdings was the seventh company to leave the project in a week, joining Paypal, Mastercard, Visa, eBay and others to withdraw amid high levels of political hostility and regulatory scrutiny.

This comes at a time when Facebook is trying to increase the number of members of the Libra Association with companies such as Uber, Lyft, Coinbase, Spotify and a number of development charities that have officially signed their accession to the project.

"Today is an important step in our journey to enable billions of people to access basic financial services and the global economy," said a spokesman for Calibra, a Facebook cryptocurrency company.

"We are proud to join the Libra Society, where we collectively seek to increase innovation and economic empowerment. It is time for change and we are committed to continuing this."

Facebook lost 25 percent of Libra's founding members, depriving it of some of its largest and most powerful companies, as well as most online payment companies that could have given it legitimacy.

The association aims to bring Libera's administration out of Facebook and protect it from the political and organizational storm that has surrounded the social media giant since the Cambridge Analytica scandal last year.

The remaining members elected a board of directors, a president and drafted laws, which require a two-thirds majority vote to make major changes in the future. The association says it still plans to have 100 members by the time the currency is launched in 2020.

It is not yet clear whether all the current members will stay, because the new charter also allows any of them to resign at any time for any reason.