David Marcus, the former head of Libra at Meta, opened up recently about the chain of events that led to the death of Libra, the blockchain project that aimed to develop a decentralized global payment network for the world. The ambitious initiative announced in 2019, had the support of several payment organizations like Paypal and Visa, which abandoned the project after facing regulatory pushbacks.
On social media, Marcus related how it all happened stating that to appease regulators and lawmakers, they had to change several aspects of the original vision of Libra. Meta was embroiled in meetings for two years before reaching a proposal that would be approved by Federal Reserve Chair Jay Powell and several members of the Fed’s Board of Governors.
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However, Marcus states that the killing of Libra was executed by Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, who told Powell in one of their bi-weekly meetings that greenlighting such a project would be a “political suicide” for him, and that she would not back him up if he allowed this project to launch. “I wasn’t in the room when this conversation happened, so take these words with a grain of salt, but effectively this was the moment Libra was killed,” he stressed.
The Libra Foundation members then dropped their support after receiving warnings from the Fed’s general counsel telling them that even when they could not stop from launching the project, they would not be comfortable with them going forward.
Marcus lamented the course of events, assessing that what he regretted the most was the political tint of the actions preceding Libtra’s downfall. He explained:
There was no legal or regulatory angle left for the government or regulators to kill the project. It was 100% a political kill—one that was executed through intimidation of captive banking institutions.
Marcus’s statements come after a series of allegations made by Marc Andreessen, a co-founder of venture capital behemoth Andreessen Horowitz, revealing that over 30 tech founders were debanked as part of an operation called Chokepoint 2.0.
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