Mubasher: Federal Reserve chairman, Jerome Powell, said that the central bank would be closely scrutinising Facebook’s newly announced digital currency, according to France 24.

“Authority for overseeing Libra is going to be in a number of places but I think the big picture is we're going to be looking really carefully at it,” Powell said at an event sponsored by the Council on Foreign Relations.

Powell was the latest official to raise concerns about Facebook’s Libra, which was launched with the aim to reduce transaction costs and deliver more services to individuals without access to the banking system.

“Given the possible scale of it, I think that our expectations from a consumer protection standpoint, from a regulatory standpoint, are going to be very, very high,” Powell was quoted by the news outlet.

The Libra coin plan represents a new ambitious initiative for the social media giant to bring the blockchain technology to the mainstream.

The new currency could create a regulatory conundrum due to the global scale of Facebook’s reach, with more than two billion users.