It seems increasingly likely that Diem, Meta’s ill-fated cryptocurrency formerly known as Libra, will never materialize. The Diem Association is reportedly “weighing the sale of its assets as a way of returning capital to its investor members”. Bloomberg
It’s unclear what assets the Diem Association owns, but the report notes that the group is in talks with bankers about selling its intellectual property and finding “a new home for the engineers who developed the technology.”
If a sale happens, it appears to be the final nail in the coffin for Diem, the cryptocurrency project Mark Zuckerberg has. Plans to get the stablecoin off the ground have been stalled for years amid regulatory pressures and concerns from lawmakers. After the first release, several high-profile partners left .
Last fall, Facebook started a small pilot, the cryptocurrency wallet formerly known as Calibra. But the fact that Novi was forced to launch without support for Diem — it used a different stablecoin called the Pax Dollar — was a sign that Diem’s future remained uncertain. Longtime Facebook executive David Marcus, who oversaw the social network’s cryptocurrency plans, said at the time that Facebook remained committed to Diem. “I want to make it clear that our support for Diem has not changed and we intend to launch Novi with Diem once it receives regulatory approval and goes live,” he wrote. Marcus announced a month after he Facebook.
A representative of the Diem Association said that Bloomberg’s the reports contained unspecified “factual errors” but declined to elaborate or comment further.
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