BREAKDOWN: The Long Strange Journey of Facebook's Libra Project
CoinDesk Podcast Network
CoinDesk
4.8 • 689 Ratings
🗓️ 1 December 2021
⏱️ 15 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
With David Marcus leaving, what is the future of diem?
This episode is sponsored by NYDIG.
On today’s episode, NLW does a retrospective of Facebook’s libra project, which was renamed late last year to diem. He argues that, whatever happens with diem specifically, it has a place in the historical record as the starting gun for a new era in stablecoins and central bank digital currencies.
Join the discussion: https://discord.gg/VrKRrfKCz8
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NYDIG, the institutional-grade platform for bitcoin, is making it possible for thousands of banks who have trusted relationships with hundreds of millions of customers, to offer Bitcoin. Learn more at NYDIG.com/NLW.
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“The Breakdown” is written, produced by and features Nathaniel Whittemore aka NLW, with editing by Rob Mitchell, research by Scott Hill and additional production support by Eleanor Pahl. Adam B. Levine is our executive producer and our theme music is “Countdown” by Neon Beach. The music you heard today behind our sponsor is “Dark Crazed Cap” by Isaac Joel. Image credit: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg/Getty Images, modified by CoinDesk.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome back to The Breakdown with me, NLW. |
| 0:09.1 | It's a daily podcast on macro, Bitcoin, and the big-picture power shifts remaking our world. |
| 0:16.2 | The breakdown is sponsored by Nidig and produced and distributed by CoinDesk. |
| 0:22.7 | What's going on, guys? It is Wednesday, December 1st. Welcome to what is undeniably the best month of the year. |
| 0:31.0 | Today we are talking about the long, strange journey of Facebook's Libra Project. |
| 0:40.8 | And of course, the context for this is the announcement that David Marcus would be leaving the project. Marcus is, of course, the most recognizable figure |
| 0:46.9 | associated with the project. He was the one to be on the hot seat originally in the first |
| 0:52.5 | hearings before Congress and the Senate, and it's |
| 0:55.6 | just hard not to see this as something of a closing of a chapter in not only Facebook's history, |
| 1:02.0 | but in the era of crypto that we've just lived through. Now, I've been following the Libra Project |
| 1:08.0 | since its very inception. I remember the day that it was announced, |
| 1:12.1 | and what a huge deal it was. It was in the midst of a deep, bare market in 2019. It was six |
| 1:19.2 | months before this podcast started, but still I was live streaming and doing a watch party of |
| 1:23.8 | the original congressional hearings. So today, what I want to do is give a little bit of a |
| 1:28.1 | retrospective on the project, as well as talk about what it meant in the context of this industry and |
| 1:33.6 | what it might mean for Facebook or meta going forward. So let's go back to the announcement. |
| 1:39.8 | It was June 18th, 2019, and like I said, we were deep in a bare market. This announcement then |
| 1:47.3 | hit like a bomb. Here was one of the biggest companies in the world announcing its entrance |
| 1:54.1 | into something akin or at least related to this cryptocurrency space. Now, the first pitch |
| 2:00.3 | from Facebook about Libra was all about |
| 2:02.8 | banking the unbanked. They talked extensively about the 1.7 billion unbanked people and the as |
| 2:09.3 | many, again, folks who were underbanked are underserved by the current system. Right from the |
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