Former Twitter CEO said that the Diem stablecoin was a waste of effort for Meta, and efforts should’ve been redirected to making open-ended protocols like Bitcoin more accessible.
Twitter founder and former CEO Jack Dorsey called Meta’s Diem cryptocurrency projects “wasted effort and time.” He believes that the company should have redirected its efforts to an open-ended protocol like Bitcoin and ways to make it “more accessible for everyone” instead.
Dorsey took part in the Bitcoin for Corporations 2022 conference hosted by MicroStrategy on Tuesday, February 1. Panelists discussed how enterprises could integrate Bitcoin (BTC) into their organizational structure. The Bitcoin keynote was an interview between Dorsey and MicroStrategy CEO Michael Saylor.
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Dorsey spoke at length about his new company, Block (formerly called Square), and what Bitcoin means to it. Block users can purchase Bitcoin using the mobile payments service Cash App.
I’m very excited to see the new models that emerge because we now have Bitcoin, and we’re now the closest we’ve ever been to a native currency for the internet, which, to me, changes everything.
When asked for his thoughts about social media platforms getting involved in crypto, Dorsey named Meta’s Libra and Diem projects as lessons to be learned from. While he believed Meta tried to launch this project for the right, noble reasons, the wrong step was not using an open protocol like Bitcoin.
Dorsey described Bitcoin as very “practical and utilitarian,” able to solve problems that other cryptocurrencies may not be able to.
Hopefully, they learned a lot, but I think there was a lot of wasted effort and time, when those two years or three years or however long it’s been could have been spent making Bitcoin more accessible for more people around the world.
He believes that focusing on Bitcoin rather than their own native cryptocurrency could have been beneficial to Meta’s products like Messenger, Instagram, or WhatsApp. Bitcoin, according to Dorsey, is an open network that, while not fully accessible, is usable.
The easier we make it, the faster we make it, the more approachable we make it, it's going to better everything. Including everything Facebook intended to do with Libra.
Meta, formerly known as Facebook, released the white paper for its cryptocurrency-based financial project Libra in 2019. The project was later rebranded as Diem. Facebook’s project was supposed to function as a stablecoin – a cryptocurrency with a fixed value.
BitDegree reported earlier this week that the Diem project ceased all operations and was sold to the crypto-based bank ​​Silvergate.