A new blow for the Diem stablecoin project? The historic head of the Facebook coin has announced that he will leave the Meta company at the end of the year
David Marcus leaves Facebook/Meta
David Marcus announced his departure from Facebook (recently renamed Meta) yesterday. Not very specific about the reasons for this choice, he explains that his “entrepreneurial spirit” pushed him to leave the social networking giant to find new adventures.
This is of course particularly notable for Facebook’s stablecoin project, Diem, and its associated wallet, Novi. David Marcus has indeed overseen Facebook’s blockchain projects from the start. He faced a colossal wave of distrust from regulators in 2019, when the project was still called Libra.
Since then, the stablecoin project has made several attempts to separate itself from Facebook. It has renamed itself Diem, and has also started to communicate more about its wallet, rather than its future cryptocurrency. Last October, a statement explained:
Diem is not Facebook. We are an independent organisation, and Facebook’s Novi is just one of the 20 or so members that make up the Diem Association.
But this was not enough to appease particularly wary legislators… Nor to convince the ecosystem as a whole, as David Marcus has strong ties to Facebook/Meta, having worked there for seven years now.
David Marcus had been president of PayPal, and it is another former payment service employee who will take his place: Stephane Kasriel.
In any case, we will continue to observe with attention the development of the project, which has already mutated so many times that it is difficult to follow all its evolutions. Recently, the Novi wallet was launched with a stablecoin from Paxos: the USDP.
Will Diem ever be offered on the wallet, years after Facebook first announced it? That remains to be seen, but stablecoin’s troubles with regulators are probably not over.
