META: How the DIEM project, formerly LIBRA was killed

By Daniele Corno

David Marcus, former executive of META's Stablecoin LIBRA, tells how the project was killed. Politics and government pressure

Libra, META's shattered dream

David Marcus, former head of Meta’s Libra project , revealed new information about the project’s demise.

Libra, later renamed Diem, was a stablecoin designed to transform global payments. The project aimed to improve the efficiency and speed of digital payments, in a context where META had billions of active users.

According to Marcus, the team had addressed every regulatory issue required by governments. However, in 2021, when everything was ready for a limited launch, there was a stall.

How Libra Was Killed.

I never shared this publicly before, but since @pmarca opened the floodgates on @joerogan’s pod, it feels appropriate to shed more light on this.

As a reminder, Libra (then Diem) was an advanced, high-performance, payments-centric blockchain paired with a…

— David Marcus (@davidmarcus) November 30, 2024

Janet Yellen, Treasury Secretary, reportedly called support for the project a “political suicide.” This promptedFederal Reserve Chairman , Jerome Powell, to withdraw all support. Shortly thereafter, the Fed informed its partner banks that it was “not comfortable” with the project. This pressure led the banks to withdraw, shutting down the project.

The weight of politics in the Libra blockade

According to Marcus, the Libra project did not stop due to lack of compliance with regulations.

All regulations had been complied with, including those against money laundering and for consumer protection. In fact, the block came due to political pressure, not technical problems.

In his tweet, Marcus expressed bitterness at how politics blocked a solution that could improve global payments even though, however, he pointed out that this experience left an important lesson.

A global payment system designed to last hundreds of years must be born on a decentralized and resilient network, such as Bitcoin.

Today, Marcus and many members of the Libra team are indeed working on new projects, such as Lightspark, of which Marcus is the founder and CEO. Lightspark is in fact involved in developing infrastructure based on Lightning Network, layer 2 of Bitcoin.