[davidgerard]

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.