David Marcus, the executive in charge of Facebook’s (Meta’s) cryptocurrency efforts, has announced he is leaving the firm after seven years at the social networking giant.
Marcus announced his departure a twitter thread in which he confirmed he is leaving Facebook at the end of the year.
The departure of Marcus should come as no surprise, considering Facebook’s attempt to launch the Libra cryptocurrency that could be used by online users to send money to anyone in the world via Facebook products, failed to get off the ground.
Marcus joined Meta in August 2014 after a two-year stint as president of PayPal, CNBC reported.
Marcus’s initial role at Facebook was as vice president in charge of the Messenger service. He left that role to take over the launch Facebook’s financial projects unit in May 2018.
That financial projects unit surprised the world when it announced the Libra blockchain currency and the Calibra digital wallet in June 2019, and said it planned to launch it by June 2020.
But the project was widely criticised by regulators around the world, including France, the Bank of England, and the US Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell, as well as others .
This sustained pressure and pushback from politicians and regulatory bodies globally, caused the project in March 2020 to announced it was to rethink its plan for libra.
And then in April 2020 the Facebook-backed Libra project drastically reduced the scope of its planned cryptocurrency.
The independent, Geneva-based project, whose development was led by Facebook, was originally intended as an electronic medium of exchange backed by an array of assets, but independent of any national currency.
The digital currency, which is now named Diem, remains unreleased to the public.
