After hitting the brick regulatory wall with its Libra global digital currency, Facebook has become way more cautious about seizing the day with its ambitious projects. The company announced that Libra is renamed to Diem (which means «day» in Latin), with all associated entities rebranded respectively: Libra Association is now called Diem Association, and, as Bloomberg reports, the currency will be referred to as the Diem Dollar.
According to Diem executives, all these moves are aimed at distancing their new (but old, but new) programme from Facebook and its old mistakes, which last year resulted in significantly unified pushback and block from regulators around the world. And not only name has changed. The association shifted its strategy away from creating a big borderless stablecoin. It will instead create a somewhat basket of stablecoins, each tied to a different fiat currency. According to the Financial Times, the first digital coin could be the one backed by the US dollar, with an initial launch as early as January 2021.
Meanwhile, PayPal, which was the first member of the global Libra Association who quit the initiative after a major backlash from regulators, also embraced the adoption of digital currencies.
Speaking at the Web Summit this week, PayPal CEO Dan Schulman pointed the upcoming trends of 2020: consumers abandoning cash, and wanting to keep main cryptocurrencies in their e-wallets, along with fiat.
“I think that if you can create a financial system, a new and modern technology that is faster, that is less expensive, more efficient, that’s good for bringing more people into the system, for inclusion, to help drive down costs, to help drive financial health for so many people… So, over the long run, I’m very bullish on digital currencies of all kinds.”