Facebook parent company Meta’s head of cryptocurrency David Marcus has recently announced that he will be leaving the company by the end of the year.
The departure of David Marcus comes after the company’s trial and failure to initiate a cryptocurrency which could be used to send money online to any person in the world through Facebook products, according to a report from CNBC.
David Marcus joined Meta, which was formerly referred to as Facebook in August 2014 after serving as the President of Paypal for two years. His initial role at Facebook then was as the Vice President in charge of the social media company’s Messenger service. He then went ahead to leave the Messenger division, launching Facebook’s financial projects unit in May 2018.
The financial projects division announced the company’s Libra blockchain currency, as well as the company’s Calibra digital wallet in June 2019. It proceeded to say that the company held hope that both announced projects would be able to go live in 2020.
However, neither of the two projects was able to go live in 2020 as Facebook went on battling very firm backlash against its cryptocurrency aspirations from lawmakers and regulators all over the world. The company then went ahead to release its own digital wallet which was renamed Novi in October. The digital currency has since been renamed Diem and is now run by an independent association but still remains unreleased to the general public.
In a tweet thread in which Marcus announced his departure, Marcus stated that there was still a lot to do right after the launch of Novi and his passion for change in payments and financial systems remained. He however stated that his “entrepreneurial DNA” had been pushing him for too long just for him to ignore it.
Marcus’s exit is not isolated, as other key executives who were at the forefront of Facebook’s ill luck in the blockchain left the company as well.