Facebook’s crypto plans and crypto problems

Source Code

In 2017, David Marcus wrote Mark Zuckerberg an email saying he thought Facebook should get involved in cryptocurrency. (He was on vacation at the time.) After a stint running PayPal and another as the head of Facebook Messenger, he thought that fixing payment infrastructure was the next big project he wanted to work on.

Zuckerberg liked the idea, which eventually became Libra, a cryptocurrency that Facebook announced in 2019 alongside a group of partners that would help it develop and govern Libra. Marcus and his new team, a group called Facebook Financial (F2 for short), was also set to work on a wallet called Calibra. The announcement went over like a lead balloon: Congressman Brad Sherman compared “Zuck Bucks” to 9/11, a number of members of the Libra Association quickly bailed on the project, and it seemed doomed before even launch. But Marcus and his team kept working.

Now, Libra is Diem and Calibra is Novi, and Marcus said both are nearly ready for public consumption. He joined the Source Code podcast to talk about how he has approached the cryptocurrency space, what it’ll take to get users to trust Facebook with their money, the merits of bitcoin and stablecoins, why NFTs are the start of something big, and much more.

For more on the topics in this episode:

• David Marcus on Twitter
• The original Libra launch post
• Welcome to Novi
• Good stablecoins, a protocol for money, and digital wallets: the formula to fix our broken payment system

For all the links and stories, head to Source Code’s homepage.