Mark Zuckerberg’s greatest ambition to create his own cryptocurrency is collapsing under increasing regulatory pressure.
According to a Bloomberg story published Wednesday morning, the Diem Association, which controls the development of the Diem digital currency, is considering selling its assets in order to restore funds to its investors.
The Diem Association’s spokesperson declined to comment. An attempt for comment from Facebook’s parent company, Meta, went unanswered.
Diem is said to be in talks with investment bankers regarding next measures, including how to sell its intellectual property, in order to capture any remaining value.
According to Bloomberg sources, the company is also looking for a new home for the engineers who created this technology.
The talks are reportedly still in the early stages, and Diem is not guaranteed to find a buyer. Even if it did, the research notes that it is unclear how the project’s intellectual property, as well as the engineers who produced it, would be valued.
According to a person who spoke to Bloomberg on the condition of anonymity, Meta owns around a third of the company, with the rest held by members of the organization such as Andreessen Horowitz, Union Square Ventures, and Ribbit Capital.
Since it was first unveiled in June 2019, Zuckerberg’s ailing crypto project has been plagued by controversy.
Libra was the name of the cryptocurrency at the time, and it was intended to be a stablecoin, which is a subset of cryptocurrencies whose value is tied to a real-world asset such as a fiat currency like the US dollar or a commodity like gold.
The original goal for Zuckerberg’s stablecoin was to create a worldwide currency backed by a basket of major currencies and government debt.
The cryptocurrency’s vision was eventually whittled down to Diem USD, a US dollar-backed stablecoin. The project has also had a tangled line of ownership, as well as an exodus of corporate partners and high-ranking executives.
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