PANews reported on November 30 that David Marcus, former head of Facebook's stablecoin Libra and current co-founder and CEO of Lightspark, published an article on the X platform to disclose how Libra was "strangled". He said that Libra (then known as Diem) is an advanced, high-performance, payment-centric blockchain, equipped with a stablecoin developed with the Meta (formerly Facebook) team, designed to solve large-scale problems in global payments. Before announcing the project, the project spent several months briefing key regulators in Washington and abroad, and then announced its launch with 28 companies in June 2019. Two weeks later, David Marcus was summoned to testify before the Senate Banking Committee and the House Financial Services Committee, which was the starting point for two years of non-stop work and changes aimed at appeasing lawmakers and regulators.
By the spring of 2021, Libra had addressed all possible regulatory concerns regarding financial crime, money laundering, consumer protection, reserve management, and was ready to launch, with some members of the Fed’s Board of Governors supporting it. Finally, Fed Chairman Jay Powell was ready to let Libra move forward in a limited way. However, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen told Jay Powell in a biweekly meeting that it would be “political suicide” to allow the project to move forward and that she would not support Jay Powell if he let it happen. David Marcus said he was not present when the conversation took place, so take these words with a grain of salt, but in fact this was the moment when Libra was strangled.
Shortly thereafter, the Federal Reserve organized a conference call with all participating banks, and the Federal Reserve General Counsel read a prepared statement to each bank, saying: "We can't stop you (Libra) from moving forward and launching, but we don't want you to do this" - just like that, it was all over. However, David Marcus said that the most important lesson learned from this incident is that if you want to build an open currency network for the world - eventually transferring trillions of dollars a day, designed for 100 years later - you must build it on the most neutral, decentralized, and unbreakable network and asset, without a doubt, Bitcoin.
