Facebook to shut down cryptocurrency venture, sell assets

The dime association, the consortium Facebook founded in 2019 to build the futuristic payments network, is selling its technology to a small California bank and about 200 million dollars to bitcoin and blockchain companies, said a person familiar with the matter. Selling in dollars.

The bank, Silvergate Capital Corp., previously inked an agreement with Diem to issue certain stablecoins — which are backed by hard dollars and designed to be less volatile than bitcoin and other digital currencies — that were at the center of the effort.

The sale represents an attempt to squeeze some remaining value out of an enterprise that was challenged almost from the beginning. Facebook, now Meta Platforms Inc., launched the project as Libra in 2019, pitching it as a way to spend money as easily as sending a text message to the social network’s billions of users.

Bloomberg previously reported that Diem was considering selling his assets.

Libra brings together well-known partners in e-commerce and payments, including PayPal Holdings Inc., Visa Inc., and Stripe Inc. There was pressure about policing on its platform. The partners agreed to join the Libra Association, a Switzerland-based group that will control the stablecoin, and will pay millions of dollars each to develop the project.

But it almost immediately came under resistance in Washington. Officials expressed concerns about its impact on financial stability and data privacy, and worried Libra could be misused by money launderers and terrorist financiers. Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell said the central bank has serious concerns. Early supporters dropped out, and Mark Zuckerberg was called before Congress, where he defended Facebook’s plan to bring financial services to the world’s underbanked.

In 2020, the group recruited Stuart Levey, a former US Treasury official and top lawyer at HSBC Holdings Plc, as chief executive and dropped the Libra name in favor of Diem.

The stablecoin deal with Silvergate was part of a reform last year to appease regulators.

David Marcus, the meta executive who oversaw the launch of what would become Diem, left the company last year.