Jack Dorsey: Diem was a waste of time, Meta should’ve focused on BTC

February 2, 2022 Coin Telegraph

Bitcoin

Dorsey said that although Facebook probably started Diem for “the right reasons,” it should’ve used an open-ended protocol like Bitcoin rather than attempting to create its own currency.

Twitter founder Jack Dorsey said that Meta’s failed cryptocurrency project Diem was “wasted effort and time,” and it should have focused its efforts on “making Bitcoin more accessible for everyone.”

MicroStrategy CEO Michael Saylor interviewed Dorsey on Tuesday at his company’s “Bitcoin for Corporations 2022” conference about how corporations could integrate and use Bitcoin (BTC).

Dorsey said that although Facebook probably started Diem for “the right reasons,” it should’ve used an open-ended protocol like Bitcoin rather than attempting to create its own currency.

“This whole thing with Libra and then Diem, I think there’s a ton of lessons there,” Dorsey told Saylor. “Hopefully they learned a lot, but I think there was a lot of wasted effort and time.”

His criticism of Twitter’s more popular and successful social media counterpart should perhaps come as no surprise. Since stepping down from his role as Twitter CEO in Nov last year, Dorsey has since made is clear that he plans to make Bitcoin the focus of his new company, Block (formerly known as Square.) Block allows users to purchase Bitcoin through mobile payments service, Cash App.

“Those two or three years or however long it's been could've been spent making Bitcoin more accessible for more people around the world.”

Dorsey added that making BTC more accessible would also benefit many of Meta’s products, specifically referring to Facebook Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp.

“We have this open network right now. And it's usable. It's not accessible to everyone, but it’s usable. The easier we make it, the faster we make it, the more approachable we make it, it's going to better everything. Including everything Facebook intended to do with Libra.”

In 2019, Facebook (now branded as Meta Platforms) released the white paper for Libra, its long-awaited crypto-based financial infrastructure project today. However, following a slew of regulatory hurdles and bad PR that forced the project to rebrand to Diem in Dec 2020, it ultimately came to an untimely end.

Meta officially announced it would be selling Diem’s intellectual property and other assets to Silvergate Capital Corporation on Jan 31 2022 for the aggregate value of $182 million, officially handing over the ropes yesterday on Feb 1.

On Jan 12, a Cash App upgrade integrated the Bitcoin Lightning Network, allowing faster and cheaper BTC transfers using the layer-two (L2) payments protocol.

Mark Zuckerberg’s stablecoin project Diem officially shuts down

February 1, 2022 Coin Telegraph

Coin Telegraph

Meta has officially given up on its stablecoin project Diem after more than two years of efforts to launch the digital currency.

Meta, formerly branded as Facebook, has officially announced the closure of its digital currency project Diem after years of major efforts to move forward with the initiative.

Announcing the news on Monday, Diem CEO Stuart Levey confirmed that Meta is selling intellectual property and other assets related to the Diem stablecoin project to its Silvergate Capital Corporation.

The Diem Association and its subsidiaries will start winding down operations “over the coming weeks,” Levey said. The association, however, is still confident that Diem’s ideals will continue to thrive even after Meta officially terminated its involvement in the project, the CEO noted:

“We remain confident in the potential for a stablecoin operating on a blockchain designed like Diem’s to deliver the benefits that motivated the Diem Association from the beginning. With today's sale, Silvergate will be well-placed to take this vision forward.”

According to an official announcement by Silvergate, the company will purchase assets of Diem for the aggregate value of $182 million. “As part of integrating the acquired assets into Silvergate’s existing technology, Silvergate expects to incur approximately $30 million of additional costs in 2022,” the firm said.

Specifically, Silvergate Bank, a subsidiary of Silvergate and Meta’s stablecoin partner, will integrate its payment platform, the Silvergate Exchange Network, with Diem’s assets. The new combination will help the bank launch a “next-generation global payment system that is faster, easier to use and more cost-effective than existing solutions,” the announcement notes.

“We identified a need for a U.S. dollar-backed stablecoin that is regulated and highly scalable to further enable them to move money without barriers. It remains our intention to satisfy that need by launching a stablecoin in 2022,” Silvergate CEO Alan Lane said.

Meta officially introduced its digital currency project back in 2019, originally called Libra and including a foundation of top global companies like Mastercard, PayPal, Visa, eBay and others. The project received massive global regulatory pushback, with financial authorities expressing major concerns over tech giants potentially taking over too much financial power.

Despite major regulatory pressure, Meta attempted to roll out some of its services in the United States, with WhatsApp messenger testing payments with Meta’s Novi wallet in December 2021.

“In the United States, a senior regulator informed us that Diem was the best-designed stablecoin project the U.S. government had seen,” CEO Levey stated.

While the Diem Association is wrapping its stablecoin, some of its original members are moving forward with their own stablecoin plans. In January, PayPal officially confirmed that it was “exploring a stablecoin” that could be called PayPal Coin.

Zuck got PUNKed — new Metaverse-linked ETF shorts Meta shares in holdings

January 27, 2022 Coin Telegraph

Business

“Facebook seems to be the antithesis of what actual consumers want their digital futures to look like,” said Subversive Capital Advisor founder Michael Auerbach.

An exchange-traded fund linked to companies involved with the Metaverse launched on the Cboe BZX Exchange — shorting shares of Facebook’s parent company, Meta.

The Subversive Metaverse ETF, listed under the ticker PUNK, opened for trading at $25.15 on Thursday. The fund’s holdings include shares of Block — formerly Square — Google’s parent company Alphabet, Microsoft, Sony, GPU manufacturer Nvidia, Coinbase Global, Galaxy Digital and online gaming platform Roblox. However, exposure to Meta — one of the largest tech firms in the world, with a $837 market capitalization — was conspicuously absent from PUNK’s top holdings.

$PUNK https://t.co/nBYPFrIKo8 pic.twitter.com/jAB2APsML9
— Michael Auerbach (@msauerbach) January 27, 2022

According to a Thursday Bloomberg report, Subversive Capital Advisor founder Michael Auerbach claimed the reputation around Facebook’s parent company — purportedly based on reports the firm was not doing what it claimed in regard to removing hate speech and posts encouraging violence — made it unsuitable for the ETF. The fund takes a short position on 40 Meta shares, the only one out of the 59 companies in its holdings.

“Facebook seems to be the antithesis of what actual consumers want their digital futures to look like,” said Auerbach. “Mark [Zuckerberg] and his team are not the best custodians of our digital futures.”

Christian Cooper, the ETF’s portfolio manager, added:

“We want to make sure this industry develops, without getting 'Zucked-up', from those who see the true potential of this space."

At the time of publication, the Metaverse ETF is trading at $24.74, having fallen more than 2% since opening. In December, ETF-issuer ProShares announced it had applied with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to list shares of a fund tracking the Solactive Metaverse Theme Index — with companies including Meta, Apple and Nvidia. However, there are also current listings for Metaverse-linked ETFs from Roundhill Ball, Evolve, Fount, and Horizons across the U.S. and Canada.

Facebook Ditches Diem Stablecoin Plans in $200M Sale

January 27, 2022 The Crypto Briefing

Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta in Talks to Sell Assets in Crypto Project Diem: Report

January 26, 2022 Bitcoin.com

Zuckerberg’s Diem reportedly weighing sale after stablecoin plans falter

January 26, 2022 Coin Telegraph

Coin Telegraph

It looks like Meta is planning to jump ship, with inside sources saying that the crypto initiative is trying to sell its assets.

Meta-backed crypto initiative “Diem” is reportedly trying to sell its assets, seemingly calling time on Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s grand ambitions for a stablecoin to act as the internet’s currency.

Diem — which was previously known as Libra — is Meta Platform’s cryptocurrency initiative. According to insider sources speaking with Bloomberg, it is considering selling assets to return capital to its investors.

The sources said that Diem is in discussions with investment bankers to determine the best way to sell its intellectual property and cash out on whatever value the project has maintained.

It’s unclear how the company will be valued, and there is no guarantee that they will be able to find a buyer. According to the source, about a third of the venture is owned by Meta. The remainder is owned by members of the association and partners, which include Coinbase Global, Uber and Shopify.

Diem has sparked no shortage of controversies in its short time of existence since launching on June 18, 2019. Libra, as it was known at the time, intended to be maintained by a Switzerland-based consortium of companies called the “Libra Association.”

However, news of the project’s launch triggered immediate pushback from the U.S. government and regulators around the world, who cited concerns regarding privacy and monetary sovereignty. Both Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and former Libra head David Marcus testified before the House Financial Services Committee.

At one July hearing in 2019, Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio asked Marcus, "do you really think people should trust Facebook with their hard-earned money?"

“If our country fails to act, we could soon see a digital currency controlled by others whose values differ radically from ours,” Marcus responded.

Deterred by regulatory scrutiny, many partners began to abandon the project altogether, eventually including Marcus himself. It was at this point it rebranded to Diem, hoping to shake off the mass regulatory panic that drowned out Libra’s initial announcement.

Myanmar Military Government Proposes to Jail Digital Currency and VPN Users

January 25, 2022 Bitcoin.com

Meta unveils Metaverse AI supercomputer, claims it will be world’s fastest

January 25, 2022 Coin Telegraph

artificial intelligence

The social media giant said that the “AI Research SuperCluster” supercomputer is already operational, and it expects it will be fully completed around the middle of the year.

Facebook’s parent company Meta says that its newly-created artificial intelligence (AI) “Research SuperCluster” (RSC) will “pave the way” towards building the Metaverse.

The social media giant said that it believes RSC is already one of the fastest supercomputers in the world and will snag the top spot when it’s fully operational in mid-2022, according to a Jan, 24 blog post unveiling the hardware.

“Developing the next generation of advanced AI will require powerful new computers capable of quintillions of operations per second,” wrote the company.

“Ultimately, the work done with RSC will pave the way toward building technologies for the next major computing platform — the metaverse, where AI-driven applications and products will play an important role.”

CEO Mark Zuckerberg added in a Jan. 25 Facebook post:

“The experiences we're building for the metaverse require enormous compute power (quintillions of operations/second!) and RSC will enable new AI models that can learn from trillions of examples, understand hundreds of languages, and more.”

The machine will be able to work across hundreds of different languages to develop “advanced AI” for computer vision, natural language processing, and speech recognition.

“We hope RSC will help us build entirely new AI systems that can, for example, power real-time voice translations to large groups of people, each speaking a different language, so they can seamlessly collaborate on a research project or play an AR game together.”

Meta didn’t disclose where the computer is located, or the costs associated with its development and creation.

Decentralized finance analyst Camilla Russo compared Meta’s new machine to the Ethereum network, which is considered by some in the industry to be a global “supercomputer” of sorts already.

facebook @Meta builds a supercomputer in private to better monetize users' data in its metaverse.

ethereum builds a world computer in the open that allows users to control their data in the metaverse.

not the same. https://t.co/lTFIFRw840
— Camila Russo (@CamiRusso) January 24, 2022

In Dec. 2021, Vice President of Intel’s accelerated computing systems and graphics group, Raja Koduri, said that current computational infrastructure will need to improve a thousand-fold in order to power the Metaverse.

“You need to access to petaflops [one thousand teraflops] of computing in less than a millisecond, less than ten milliseconds for real-time uses,” Koduri told Quartz at the time.

Largely described as the next iteration of the internet, the Metaverse refers to a virtual space where people can work, play and socialize – often by using virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) technology.

In October, Facebook rebranded as Meta to reflect its renewed focus beyond social media.