A leader of Diem and an Executive at Facebook and the digital currency project of the company, Kelvin Weil, has on Thursday announced his exit from Facebook to join a new satellite firm.
The Exit and the Impact
This news is a huge blow to the crypto ambition of Facebook that was made known to the general public in June 2019 after quite a consideration but has hit a standstill amid regulatory concerns.
Truly, Kelvin Weil made his name from Facebook due to his contribution to the growth of Instagram even though he is a master user of Twitter. He went on to be one of the founders of Libra – a digital currency initiative by Facebook. Recently, he revealed his departure from Facebook on Twitter but noted that he still believes in the initiative and the mission.
The news of Weil’s departure follows the departure of one other key strategic executive that is working on the digital currency initiative of Facebook. And it was revealed that Weil would be joining Planet Labs.
The Project’s Goal, Kickback and Plan Revisit
The goal for Libra is to establish a new globally recognized decentralized currency when Facebook made the public announcement, and this was hoped to be achieved with the collaboration of some giants in the payment services like PayPal and Visa. Some of the companies working in collaboration for this project, like MasterCard and Stripe quitted following the negative kickbacks received from the regulators and congress.
Since that time, there has been a more incessant delay in the launch of the digital currency that was scheduled to take place in 2019. With time, there had to be modifications of plans from Facebook for the currency. And rather than creating a global token attached to different currencies, the new plan is to create several stablecoins that will be available for use in different countries.
One of the plans is the rebranding of the name of the coins and the wallet meant for the issuance from Libra and Calibra to Diem and Novi, respectively. This idea came last year to create an emphasis that the digital currency project is running independently from Facebook.
In all of these, the availability of the token to Facebook users remains vague and unclear.
