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Former Meta exec says the company's failed crypto project was '100% a political kill' by regulators
- David Marcus, the former Meta executive heading the company's Libra cryptocurrency project, says that politics led to the demise of the crypto project.
- Libra was a stablecoin digital currency initiative introduced by Facebook in 2019 to provide financial services to billions of bankless people around the world.
- The project encountered challenges from lawmakers and regulators, forcing many of the collaborating companies, including Mastercard, PayPal, Uber, and Spotify, to withdraw.
- David Marcus testified before both the Senate Banking Committee and the House Financial Services Committee in 2019, resulting in his project going through two years of nonstop work and regulatory appeasement.
- Though Meta had overcome regulatory issues as of the Spring of 2021, Diem, as it was later known, remained discontinued alive due to politics.
- Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell expressed serious concerns about privacy, money laundering, consumer protection, and financial stability in the 2019 House Financial Services Committee hearing at which Marcus testified.
- According to Marcus, at biweekly meetings, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen informed Fed Chair Jay Powell that permitting the project to proceed would be a political mistake, and she would not support him if he did.
- In January 2022, the Meta-backed Diem Association declared that it was winding up and selling its assets to crypto bank Silvergate for $182 million.
- David Marcus, who directed the Meta-supported Libra/Diem project now heads payments start-up Lightspark and says that political hindrances were the biggest factor in the project's demise.
- Marcus had established Lightspark after the downfall of the project and is presently heading the payments startup.
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