David Marcus, one of the top executives at Meta (née Facebook) and the leader of its long-awaited and yet-to-launch cryptocurrency project, has announced he’s leaving the social media giant to pursue other projects—teasing that he’ll be creating a startup in a “personal news” Twitter thread.
One month ago, at Facebook’s Connect 2021 conference, CEO Mark Zuckerberg introduced Meta, which brings together its apps and technologies under one new company brand.
Meta’s focus will be to bring the metaverse to life and help people connect, find communities and grow businesses.
The metaverse will feel like a hybrid of today’s online social experiences, sometimes expanded into three dimensions or projected into the physical world.
It will let you share immersive experiences with other people even when you can’t be together — and do things together you couldn’t do in the physical world.
Tangled in red tape
Marcus joined Facebook in 2014 from PayPal and first ran the Messenger service before spearheading the newly-created blockchain division from 2018.
Since then he’s co-created diem (née libra), built Novi, the company’s digital wallet that launched in October, and apparently spent most of his time wrestling with regulators who feared a Facebook empire-wide private digital currency would elevate the company a little too near nation-state status.
What next for diem?
Plans for Facebook’s ambitious libra project, originally conceived as a way to send money across borders as easily as sending a text, have been heavily scaled back over recent years, with launches repeatedly pushed back and eventually being rebranded as diem.
Last month, Novi launched a pilot project using the Paxos-administered USDP stablecoin instead of diem. A Meta spokesperson told Coindesk that Stephane Kasriel, another PayPal alum, will be the new head of Novi.
Marcus the maximalist
Marcus told The Information in August he’d been “a big fan of bitcoin for a long time.” Perhaps he’ll team up with bitcoin-bestie Jack Dorsey, who’s probably got an hour or two to spare after quitting Twitter this week.
The bottom line: It’s a brave new metaverse and diem still hasn’t gotten off the ground.
