Zuckerberg no longer wants cryptocurrencies

After three years trying to consolidate Diem, a cryptocurrency originally launched under the name Libra , Meta (the company formerly known as Facebook) seems ready to back down.

According to the publication Bloomberg , the company has begun to sound out its members of the Diem Association , mainly investment banks, about the possibility of selling the patents and all the intellectual property associated with it and relocating the engineers associated with the project.

Diem was officially announced in 2019 under the name Libra, and was an attempt to create a stablecoin (a digital currency with a fixed exchange rate) to use in the different Facebook services. With Libra, according to the initial proposal, you could pay for games purchased within the social network, or advertising on Instagram.

Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, obtained the initial support of several heavyweights in the world of finance, including Visa and MasterCard , and commitments with several companies for its implementation, such as Uber, Lyft or Spotify. The original idea was to associate the value of Libra with a basket of international currencies to give it greater stability than that traditionally associated with cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin.

But the deployment was much more difficult than planned , in part because of the cold reception from the US government, which immediately questioned the viability of the operation. Zuckerberg had to testify before Congress about his plans, which many regulators considered dangerous given the platform's large audience.

This pressure scared away many of the initial partners. Visa and Mastercard abandoned the project and Meta was forced to give it a facelift, changing the name to Diem and associating the value exclusively to the dollar. The US Federal Reserve, however, ended up burying it by declaring that it would not allow any bank to issue the currency due to the risk it would entail.

Although Meta has not yet officially confirmed the death of the project, none of its platforms still support the coin and part of the team responsible for it left the association (of which Meta represents approximately one third) during the past. anus.