Facebook's Libra Stablecoin is Dead in 2022
Meta will be selling Diem as soon as possible.
Facebook’s scam of trying to clone a stablecoin appears to be officially over. Long live the Metaverse! The reality is PayPal has a better chance of launching a Stablecoin than Meta does. It’s important to realize how much Facebook has failed in trying to keep up with the future.
Time to tell Grandma about NFTs on Facebook, I guess? Social media conglomerate Meta is exploring plans to let users create, showcase, and sell NFTs on Facebook and Instagram, according to a report from The Financial Times. Facebook cloning what’s trendy is a bad sign for its innovation and R&D. Instagram has failed in E-commerce compared to ByteDance’s TikTok and Douyin, in a significant way.
Facebook’s embattled cryptocurrency project is likely coming to an end
Even Jack Dorsey Tweeted “Carpe Diem” to Facebook’s Libra recently. It really brings home just how terrible Facebook has been at launching anything new recently. More than two years after it was first announced, the Facebook-sponsored cryptocurrency formerly known as Libra appears to be coming to an end.
Facebook is now called Meta, and Libra is now called I think the Diem Association? It’s hard to keep up with Facebook’s failure to convince regulators that its plan was workable. Talent left and then even David Marcus, the executive who originally proposed Libra and led Meta’s digital wallet, left the company late last year after most of the founding team behind the project jumped ship.
The Zuck buck is no more. Originally, Libra was meant to be a digital token backed by a basket of currencies from around the world, but regulators quickly halted that idea. So a simplified design was created, pegging a rebranded Diem token to the US dollar. Apparently that too wasn’t able to get the green light from regulators. WhatsApp and Instagram remain poorly monetized apps outside of legacy digital advertising.
Libra IP is Going to be Sold
The Diem Association set up by Facebook to manage the digital token is exploring a sale of its assets after meeting resistance by regulators who opposed the initiative, according to a new report by Bloomberg. This is the end of the beginning of the end for Facebook’s crypto ambitions, to hijack Web 3.0.
The U.S. Federal Reserve “dealt the effort a final blow” by putting pressure on Silvergate, the banking partner that Diem said it was partnering with last year to launch the token, Bloomberg reports.
Facebook’s Libra may have been dead as early as July, 2019. The US government crushed Libra like a bug in July 2019 when it became clear that Facebook was not only messing with the money, but doing so with utter incompetence. It’s hard for a company like Facebook to understand FinTech or financial regulation well let alone the blockchain and Web 3.0 side of things.
Block, formerly Square wants to take the glory and succeed where Facebook’s Libra failed. So it’s only normal another tycoon called Jack Dorsey is making fun of it on Twitter (another biased network to Silicon Valley).
You can read the Bloomberg piece that explains why it’s being sold here. I think few of us actually expected Mark Zuckerberg to have been able to clone crypto for his own centralized and somewhat dubious social media empire.
Regulatory discourse around stablecoins has been leaning for a while towards requiring stablecoin issuers to be banks. The proposed STABLE Act, put forward in late 2020, didn’t get put into law — but the thinking in it has been influential. CBDCs and stable coins are coming, after a long way.
Central banks can’t let crypto become too powerful realistically otherwise the monetary system would begin to break down. It’s FinTech companies that had a true renaissance since 2020, not stable coins or crypto platforms. Many gigantic FinTech companies have come of age.
Regulators around the world have been thinking seriously about the risks associated with stablecoins since 2019 but recently, concerns have intensified, particularly in the United States. Republicans and Democrats united in a spirit of true bipartisanship — they hated everything about Libra the moment they saw it.
Meta-backed crypto initiative “Diem” is reportedly trying to sell its assets, seemingly calling time on Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s grand ambitions for a stablecoin to act as the internet’s currency. The Zuck Buck won’t be the one true currency to unite mankind. Sorry about that.
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