Diem (Libra)

» see diem.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Diem is a strange thing to write a grave for, because it never actually lived. as an engineer i followed the crypto years from a distance, curious about the technology and unconvinced by most of the promises, and Libra was the loudest promise of them all. it was going to be a currency for the whole planet, and i never held one, because nobody ever did.

it began in june 2019 as Libra, Facebook's proposal for a stablecoin backed by real assets and run by an association of big companies signed on as partners. the pitch was that anyone with the app could move money across borders instantly, which mattered most for people without bank accounts. Facebook framed it as helping the unbanked. governments heard something else entirely: a private company minting money for two billion users.

the reaction was immediate and hostile. within weeks regulators in the united states and europe were holding hearings, and several of the early corporate partners, Visa and PayPal among them, quietly walked away before it launched. Facebook retreated and rebuilt the project as a smaller thing. it renamed the result Diem in late 2020 and moved it out from under its own roof to look less like a Facebook product. none of it worked.

~ the dossier ~

~ the actual end ~

the CEO of Diem later said a senior regulator had told them it was the best-designed stablecoin the government had seen, and that it still would not be allowed to launch. by january 2022 the message was final. the association sold its technology to Silvergate Bank for around two hundred million dollars and wound itself up. Silvergate wrote the whole thing off within a year and then collapsed in march 2023, so even the buyer did not outlive the purchase by much.

~ what got buried with it ~

Diem belongs with the older attempts to build private money online, [[e-gold]] and [[digicash]]. it also sits next to Facebook's own earlier try, [[facebook-credits]], which at least got spent before it closed. the difference is that Diem was killed in the design phase, a rare case of a product with billions behind it that governments simply refused to let into the world. the idea did not die, though. every central bank now studying a digital currency is answering the question Libra forced them to ask.

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