Facebook gives its ambitions for digital payments with the sale of DIEM assets

The DIEM cryptocurrency project led by Facebook is preparing for the sale of its assets, since the social media giant is beaten by its once far-reaching ambitions for digital payments.

The Diem Association, which was launched by Facebook in 2019 and is supported by 25 companies and non -profit groups, plans to dissolve the people familiar with the discussions.

A person said that the buyer of his technology was the Silvergate Bank based in California for $ 200 million. The Wall Street Journal was first reported on this deal. Diem and Silvergate rejected a statement. Facebook, which recently renamed Meta, did not respond to a request for comment.

META searched for sources of income to promote his future growth. The Silicon-Valley Group has been hit by the recent scandals for modern content and data protection, which contributed to a decline in the popularity of its most important social network products Facebook and Instagram, a trend that threatens its advertising-based business model with an annual sales of $ 85 billion.

The sale will probably give the opportunity to pay some funds to the founding members of the initiative, which originally promised $ 10 million for participation.

The struck project was pushed back by the supervisory authorities from the start. It suffered a difficult origin when a wave of its founding members - including PayPal, Mastercard and Vodafone - stopped within their first year after the project was subjected to an official examination.

In view of the size of Facebook, the wax dogs particularly expressed concerns about money laundering and currency stability. The company was also confronted with a counter reaction because of the data protection scandal of Cambridge Analytica.

Earlier known as Libra, Diem initially tried to create a digital Coin covered by a basket of real currencies. But to appease the US supervisory authorities, she narrowed her vision in 2020 to support the introduction of a coin one-to-one through the dollar, which is known as a stable coin, and hired the former HSBC head of law Stuart Levey as the first managing director.

In another desperate attempt to receive the official approval in May, it shifted its activities from Switzerland to the USA and announced that Silvergate would become the exclusive issuer of its planned stablecoin and manage its reserves.

Nevertheless, the project still got no green light from the US supervisory authorities and David Marcus, the founder of the initiative, left Facebook at the end of last year.

A sale to Silvergate, if it were completed, Facebook's greatest push into finance would bring to a grueling conclusion.

The company built Novi, a digital wallet to keep the coin. Novi, however, started in October with a small pilot project Coin by an external provider, the Paxos dollar.

META seemed to have changed the focus on its crypto -related ambitions and to work on projects that would make users possible not to buy and sell fungal tokens - digital assets that are built on the blockchain.

people who are familiar with the plans said that the Novi letter bag was also crucial for these plans to penetrate a hype-driven world of NFTs, the popularity of which increase to a global market worth $ 40 billion in the past year.

Additional reporting from Leila Abboud in Paris and Kiran Stacey in Washington DC