I have no insider knowledge, but my guess is that nobody wants to work on this project. Best to avoid any project that might get you hauled in front of the senate, which has already happened to Libra.
Libra is a zombie project. It was effectively killed as of the July 2019 House and Senate hearings; it's just taken years to stop twitching.
A pile of Libra/Diem/Novi people have left. I think it's less fear of being hauled up in front of the Senate, and just being sick of spending their lives in development hell. Even the original instigator of Libra, Morgan Beller, left in late 2020.
The last attempt to get permission to do Diem was earlier this year, when they wanted to do a US dollar stablecoin with an actual bank (Silvergate) holding the backing. But a consumer stablecoin that's meant to serve as money in society was still too much to allow, particularly from Facebook. So Novi is now scouting around for other stablecoins to use in its wallet software.
This is assuming a significant number of users of Facebook-owned apps want to use Facebook for payments, which is unclear. Messenger Pay/Facebook Pay has existed since 2015 and still has negligible volume as a percentage of the FB userbase.
Hell, dude. That's hard to imagine. Maybe it's hard for them to recruit world leading experts on crypto, but Facebook still has a ton of top talent and a ton of hungry people willing to make a name for themselves within the company.
Sure but justifying working for Facebook or in crypto currencies to yourself takes enough cognitive dissonance, I can't imagine the lengths you have to got to to justify working on Facebook's crypto currency projects.
This mindset is not as abundant as the older days, as a lot of us developers are now becoming more "morally" aware of how our code affects society on international scales.
Yeah, but my point is not everyone thinks the same.
You might think that way, and consciousness about the greater effects of technology on the world are coming into focus, but there are still plenty of people who don't see it that way at all. Or they don't care so much and just want a paycheck.
It's harder to get young liberals in oil, finance and defense, yet those industries still have plenty of talented people working for them.
A pile of Libra/Diem/Novi people have left. I think it's less fear of being hauled up in front of the Senate, and just being sick of spending their lives in development hell. Even the original instigator of Libra, Morgan Beller, left in late 2020.
The last attempt to get permission to do Diem was earlier this year, when they wanted to do a US dollar stablecoin with an actual bank (Silvergate) holding the backing. But a consumer stablecoin that's meant to serve as money in society was still too much to allow, particularly from Facebook. So Novi is now scouting around for other stablecoins to use in its wallet software.
This is assuming a significant number of users of Facebook-owned apps want to use Facebook for payments, which is unclear. Messenger Pay/Facebook Pay has existed since 2015 and still has negligible volume as a percentage of the FB userbase.