Former PayPal president and head of Meta’s defunct Libra project, David Marcus has shed light on the unfortunate incident surrounding the project. Marcus took to microblogging platform X to reveal that Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen was indirectly involved in the project’s death.
The former PayPal president decided to clear the air on the issue after Marc Andreessen discussed the project on the Joe Rogan Show.
According to Marcus, the project was on course to become a transformative global payment system until political machinations led to its death. Marcus noted that he needed to shed light on the incidents that went on behind the scenes and ultimately led to the project’s failure.
David Marcus discusses issues surrounding Libra’s lunch
According to David Marcus, the company had the initiative to create a stablecoin-powered payments system based on a blockchain to solve the problem of cross-border payments in 2019. The initiative led to the birth of Libra, which Marcus concedes immediately started to raise eyebrows. He noted that even though the project was backed by about 28 companies, it immediately entered the crosshairs of regulators.
How Libra Was Killed.
— David Marcus (@davidmarcus) November 30, 2024
I never shared this publicly before, but since @pmarca opened the floodgates on @joerogan’s pod, it feels appropriate to shed more light on this.
As a reminder, Libra (then Diem) was an advanced, high-performance, payments-centric blockchain paired with a…
Marcus mentioned that within weeks of the announcement, he faced the Senate Committee on Banking and the House Financial Services Committee to defend it. However, those summons were smaller compared to the scrutiny the project will face later. He mentioned that in the next two years after its unveiling, there were so many efforts to address certain concerns from regulators. Marcus noted that regulators had concerns related to financial crimes, money laundering, and consumer protection.
After scaling through those concerns, the company eventually secured the green light for the project to move forward in 2021. However, he noted that the approval was for the limited pilot rollout and it was given by some members of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve.
“By spring of 2021 (yes they slowly played us at every step), we had addressed every last possible regulatory concern across financial crime, money laundering, consumer protection, reserve management, buffers, and so much more, and we were ready to launch,” Marcus added.
Janet Yellen warned Fed Chair about backing Libra’s launch
In his X post, David Marcus clarified that while the lead-up to the proposed launch did not come without hiccups, the company had been ready for a slow, small-scale pilot rollout. He even noted that Fed Chair Jay Powell and the Board of Governors at the Federal Reserve supported the project.
However, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen threw a wrench in their plans when she got involved in the discussion.
Marcus highlighted that he was not in their bi-weekly meetings but as he was told, Yellen told the Fed Chair that if he backed the Libra project, it may result in “political suicide.” She went on to intimate that she wouldn’t be there to back him if it eventually happened.
Notably, Marcus noted that he did not witness the conversation, but that was when the Libra dream died. “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 said.
After Yellen’s warnings, Marcus noted that the Fed called the financial institutions participating in the program, discouraging them from moving ahead with the project. Marcus said each bank got a statement that read: “We can’t stop you from moving forward and launching, but we are not comfortable with you doing so.”, noting that the banks started to pull out of it after that.
Marcus mentioned that the project passed all regulatory and legal checks, meaning its death was politically motivated.
However, Marcus said he left the ordeal with many lessons, noting that the design was hailed across the technology industry. He also highlighted that if any entity wants to build an open money grid for the world, it should do it on a neutral and decentralized network, just like Bitcoin.
David Marcus has moved on from Libra and is currently working at Lightspark, an open payment method built on the lightning network.
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