The Diem association would try to sell its assets to allow its members to recover some parts of their initial investment, according to revelations from Bloomberg, published on January 25. Created in 2019 at the initiative of Facebook, now Meta, the Diem cryptocurrency had to face manifestly insurmountable regulatory pressure.
Good deal, Diem’s intellectual property for sale!
The cryptocurrency wanted by Meta and implemented by a homonymous association, would it reach the end of its tortuous road? The Diem association would have contacted investment banks to sell its intellectual property with the engineers who are still working on the project.
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According to the latest information published by the wall street journal, Meta would have already found a client. Silvergate Capital, a bank specializing in cryptocurrencies and an old acquaintance of Diem, would be a candidate for the rpurchase for 200 million dollars.
The association is third-party owned by Meta and by venture capital and technology companies. In the first category is Andressen Horowitz, a fund known for its involvement in Web3, in the second companies such as Coinbase, Uber, or Shopify.
A tortuous story
Meta’s announcement of the launch of its stablecoin, named Libra at the time, provoked a massive outcry from regulators around the world. A recent report from the United States Federal Reserve (FED) reflects fears at the time that a company as powerful as Facebook would issue its own cryptocurrency. could lead to excessive concentration of economic power “.
Very quickly key partners of the association like eBay, Visa, Mastercard, left the ship. After only a few months of existence, the president of the Swiss Confederation, where the association is based, described Libra as a total failure.
Meta did not give up. Mark Zuckerberg’s company renamed Libra en Diem in December 2020 and attempted to relaunch the machine. In May 2021, the dollar-backed stablecoin was expected to be issued within a year. This is where the Silvergate bank, a partner in the project, meets.
Another attempt, another failure. During the summer, the FED said it was unable to give Silvergate the assurance that it would eventually authorize the project. This doubt represented too great a risk for the bank. This obviously does not prevent him, a few months later, from applying to buy out Diem’s intellectual property.
In October 2021 Meta ends up testing the other part of its initial project, a digital wallet. Calibra, also renamed Novi, is set up between the United States and Guatemala, along with another dollar-linked stablecoin Diem.
A surprise… Limited
Despite the pitfalls constantly accumulating, David Marcus, at the origin of the project at Facebook, continued to defend his cryptocurrency. A few weeks later, the latter announced his departure from Meta.
After this succession of misadventures, few still believe in a future of Diem. During the initial revelation of the sale of the cryptocurrency, the association timidly defended itself, pointing out ” some factual errors in the article from the American media, without further details. It’s hard to know at this time whether Diem will survive its takeover or whether Silvergate is primarily interested in cryptocurrency technology.