Meta’s Crytpo Challenge Loses Prime Govt, the Newest Blow for the Company’s Digital Funds Push

Meta’s troubled cryptocurrency project has taken another blow when top manager David Marcus, formerly at PayPal, announced he would do so leave the company at the end of the year.

As reported by Bloomberg, Marcus leaves Meta to pursue entrepreneurial opportunities and explore other passions outside of the company:

As per Marcus:

“While there is still so much to do right after we launched Novi – and I am still passionate about the need to change our payment and financial systems – my entrepreneurial DNA has pushed me too many mornings in a row to keep doing it to ignore.”

Marcus is replaced by the former UpWork CEO Stephane Kasriel as head of the Novi project, which, as already mentioned, is still a long way from gaining importance as a payment option, although it started with a lot of fanfare almost two and a half years ago.

Originally heralded as “Libra”, Meta had hoped it could introduce a native digital payments system within Facebook that would eventually boost e-commerce and wider transactions to make it a more important utility for more users around the world .

The big focus in this sense seemed to be India, where Meta has been working to expand its presence and tap into the burgeoning digital ecosystem of the world’s second most populous nation. Now Facebooks largest user marketExpanding its presence in India’s technology shift could make Meta a major player enabling a wide range of functions in the region, including mostly wire transfers, with India having more wire transfer transactions than any other nation.

These transactions cost money, with financial providers charging fees for each transfer, and Meta saw this as a way to maximize the take-up of its free crypto-based transactions, which then would allow Indian users to move more money through its systems, which in turn would make it easier to find them to encourage more payments and purchases in their apps. If you already trust Meta with referrals, it is less of a leap to evolve into more transaction types, which was the main promise of the Novi project and the biggest push for the company’s push.

But then, shortly after the Libra project was announced, Indian officials did excluded any hope of a Facebook currency within its borders. This was a critical first blow to the project, which subsequently lost the support of various payment providers and officials and seemed doomed to failure, both due to opposition to digital payments and to meta in general.

Meta has tried several times since then to remodel the project, which includes rename to ‘Novi’ in May last year, while only last month finally, Meta switched to a live pilot test its Novi digital wallet in the US and Guatemala, which allows users to send and receive money between the two regions.

This is the latest big jump that Marcus refers to in his announcement. And while it appears to be positive that the project is moving to the next phase, broader concerns about cryptocurrency and its security, especially within Meta’s tools, are likely to remain an obstacle for some time to come.

In fact, various nations have decided to completely ban the use of cryptocurrency, including China and Indiawhile Swedish officials urged the EU to ban crypto projects due to climate impacts related to crypto mining. Research also suggests that British citizens also: a Ban on cryptocurrencies, and while the momentum for crypto-centric projects like NFTs builds online, there appears to be fundamental concern about an impending market crash that will drill a hole in the current crypto bubble and undo the perceived value of these rising digital products.

In many ways, the nature of crypto communities, largely built on goodwill, has created a more inviting and attractive avenue for crypto investing, but on a larger scale there still appears to be significant risk in these payment systems with limited opportunities for recourse Regarding fraud and theft. Hence, the view that crypto projects will benefit some of the most vulnerable communities can also be flawed, as it could equally open the same people to wider exploitation, and while global banking systems need to evolve, the promise of financial sovereignty remains persist burdened, even in a best-case application.

And that’s before you consider the wider backlash against Meta and its anti-competitive practices that are using it to dominate the social media and digital ad markets. Few governments want Zuck and Co to gain even more power, and therefore resistance to its digital payments project is likely to persist for some time, which could still bring the Novi project to crash.

The loss of Marcus and his considerable expertise and industry strength is a significant blow in this regard and while Meta will carry on it will be interesting to see if and how Novi performs in 2022.