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Libra Creator David Marcus Says He’s Leaving Facebook at Year’s End
He leaves the stablecoin project, first announced in June 2019, as it continues to face stiff regulatory headwinds.
David Marcus is leaving Facebook (now Meta) with the company’s libra (now diem) stablecoin yet to be fully launched.
He said Tuesday on Twitter he was stepping down as Meta’s crypto lead and leaving the company, suggesting he’d return to his “entrepreneurial” roots.
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Marcus leaves the Diem project, first announced in June 2019, as it continues to face stiff regulatory headwinds.
While there’s still so much to do right on the heels of launching Novi — and I remain as passionate as ever about the need for change in our payments and financial systems — my entrepreneurial DNA has been nudging me for too many mornings in a row to continue ignoring it. (2/7)
— David Marcus (@davidmarcus) November 30, 2021
Marcus, a former president of PayPal, first joined Facebook as the vice president of the company’s Messenger division. He was tapped to lead Facebook’s blockchain efforts in mid-2018.
Libra, initially an ambitious plan to make sending money across borders as easy as sending a text, was immediately met with scrutiny following its 2019 announcement. Marcus was the face of Facebook on Capitol Hill as the company sought the blessing of U.S. regulators before launching.
Plans for Libra were scaled back through a series of cuts and the exodus of key corporate backers before being rebranded as Diem. Last month, Novi, the Meta-owned crypto wallet subsidiary, launched a pilot project that relied on the Paxos-administered USDP stablecoin instead of diem. Even this scaled-down pilot was met with hostility from lawmakers.
A Meta spokesperson confirmed that Stephane Kasriel, another PayPal alum, will be the new head of Novi.
Zack Seward
Zack Seward is CoinDesk’s contributing editor-at-large. Up until July 2022, he served as CoinDesk’s deputy editor-in-chief. Prior to joining CoinDesk in November 2018, he was the editor-in-chief of Technical.ly, a news site focused on local tech communities on the U.S. East Coast. Before that, Seward worked as a reporter covering business and technology for a pair of NPR member stations, WHYY in Philadelphia and WXXI in Rochester, New York. Seward originally hails from San Francisco and went to college at the University of Chicago. He worked at the PBS NewsHour in Washington, D.C., before attending Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism.
