Facebook says "Carpe Diem" for the last time 💀; UBS acquires Wealthfront for $1.4B 🤯; The crazy FinTech boom in LatAm. Expect even more! 🚀
Good Morning FinTech, January 27
Good morning Everyone,
And happy Thursday! The week is approaching an end, but it seems that it’s getting only more and more exciting. In fact, this might be the best newsletter issue this week. 3 amazing FinTech stories, 12 funding announcements & more. Let’s jump straight into the good stuff:
Facebook says Carpe Diem for the last time 💀
The news 👀 Mark Zuckerberg is seeing the demise of his cryptocurrency project Diem due to regulatory pressures, Bloomberg reported.
The Diem Association, which used to be known as Libra and which is backed by Meta, is looking at selling its assets as a way to potentially return capital to investor members.
The history 👉 Meta’s Facebook debuted the idea for a stable digital currency in 2019, purporting that it could deliver big changes for global finance. The company collaborated with dozens of others at the time. However, the partnerships weren’t enough to protect it all from a huge amount of scrutiny — Zuckerberg was called to testify before Congress, and then several partners (i.e. Stripe, PayPal, Visa, Mastercard, among others) dropped out of the project.
The big pushback 🥊 Politicians and central banks wasted little time from Day 1 in declaring that Libra had the potential to undermine the U.S. dollar and trigger financial stability — with some even claiming that this digital asset could do more harm to America than 9/11. Others argued that the tech giant was unfit to operate a private currency following a string of controversies.
The project then changed its name to Diem from Libra after Zuckerberg’s testimony. But it provided little help.
What’s happening now 🤔 Now, according to Bloomberg, Diem is speaking with investment bankers on strategies to sell off its intellectual property. It will also seek to find new homes for the engineers who developed the tech, cashing out any other value remaining in the venture.
In retrospect, it was inevitable.