Generically, we have seen instances where centralized ledgers/databases are manipulated and permit double spend. Even in the case of multi billion dollar publicly traded companies going Private, during due diligence we have seen upward of double the issued shares of stock than actually exist. In such a case we have the corporation with a centralized stock ledger, stock trusts with their own centralized ledgers, etc... but the mistake of double spend still happened. In those cases Blockchain would have never allowed those errors, one such case cost the buyer $150M personally post acquisition. Not to say that is in anyway applicable here, but without even knowing the token function we can’t say, but it just goes to show Blockchain does have some use cases and benefits where centralized ledgers have failed costing hundreds of millions.
Take the current status of publicly traded companies, they require a lot of middlemen to manage these centralized stock ledgers, including, the corporate general counsel, underwriters/investment banks, stock trust, stock exchanges, and stock brokers/trading apps.
Each one of those middlemen takes a significant slice of the pie, whereas Blockchain would allow corporatations to bypass all these middlemen and allow stock to be issued and traded P2P.
Is there a reason you believe the existing centralized stock ledgers of public companies and system of middlemen is more advantageous than having P2P stock on a distributed ledger/network?
The only potential advantage of such a system over an RDBMS is the inability to reverse transactions without people taking serious notice, simple git-style hash chains generally solve this too, often with reduced overhead.
Unask the question and ask who benefits instead.
Real currencies (USD, EUR, ..) are stored by visa / mastercard in regular databases, so why not facebook's currency ?
It's why you didn't see anyone actually supporting Venezuela's Petro.
That plus cryptocurrencies is still a buzzword that generates interest and speculation (especially since they've rebounded a bit these past few months).
Number two, they want to get in ahead of other cryptocurrency. They don't want to wait around for Bitcoin or Ethereum to become an expected form of payment, because by that time they won't be able to cash in. If they have their own cryptocurrency, they can take advantage of the hype for bitcoin etc., but still control and profit from it directly.
A blockchain can be implemented in a very simple way when operated by a centralized authority. What adds complexity to it is the consensus protocol required for decentralization when you cannot trust all parties in the network.
Clearing takes less time than FedWire or ACH.
Settlement, on the other hand, still has to go through the Federal Reserve.
Until Quantum Computing comes of age, this is theoretically much harder with DLT / blockchains.
On a decentralized, trustless blockchain you have no such thing. So you either end up hard-forking like Ethereum did after their DAO debacle (but then are you a decentralized trustless system anymore?) or you continue normally and basically the people who lost their money are screwed.
Most of the time is spent managing risk. Sure, that includes persistence, but that is also marginal. You also have to validate integrity, authenticity, cross-reference against legal requirements (eg. enforce rates, detect fraud — including internal fraud, apply sanctions lists, estimate AML-CFT risk, …). You have to make sure all accounting rules are followed. You have to abide by the procedures that you and the regulator determined. All that with no downtime.
All of this takes time. Historically, a large part was manual. While automation has helped, there are quite a few clearing houses where an army of programmers is spent battling the chaos.
A system least tolerant to inconsistencies and most tolerant to failure, increases reliability while reducing risk. The cryptographic properties of a distributed blockchain help there, regardless of whether the system has open membership (which is not Facebook’s case, unlike most cryptocurrencies).
A different ledger design can be equally powerful or more. In fact, I expect that a lot of the compliance and accounting logic can be expressed elegantly in a custom design.