Jack Dorsey, the former CEO of Twitter, criticized the failed cryptocurrency project Diem as “wasted effort and time,” stating that it should have concentrated on “making Bitcoin more accessible for everyone” rather than pursuing a separate blockchain platform.
On Tuesday, Mike Saylor, the CEO of embedded analytics platform MicroStrategy, interviewed Dorsey at his “Bitcoin for Corporations 2022” event about how businesses can incorporate and utilize Bitcoin (BTC).
Dorsey says that instead of Diem, Facebook should’ve focused on Bitcoin
Facebook may have started Diem for “the right reasons,” according to Dorsey, but it should’ve used an open-ended protocol like Bitcoin rather than inventing its own currency.
“This whole thing with Libra and then Diem, I think there’s a ton of lessons there. Hopefully, they learned a lot, but I think there was a lot of wasted effort and time,” Dorsey said.
Since stepping down from his position as Twitter CEO, Dorsey has made it clear that he wants to make Bitcoin the theme of his new firm, Block (formerly known as Square). Cash App enables users to buy Bitcoin using their mobile wallets.
“Those two or three years or however long it’s been could’ve been spent making Bitcoin more accessible for more people around the world.”
According to Dorsey, making Bitcoin more accessible will benefit many of Meta’s services, including Facebook Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp.
“We have this open network right now. And it’s usable. It’s not accessible to everyone, but it’s usable. The easier we make it, the faster we make it, the more approachable we make it, it’s going to better everything. Including everything Facebook intended to do with Libra.”
The white paper for Libra, Facebook’s long-awaited crypto-based financial architecture project, was published today in 2019. Despite a series of regulatory hurdles and negative public relations that compelled it to rename itself as Diem in December 2020.
Today, we’ve learned that Facebook’s stablecoin project, Diem, is coming to an end after months of development. On Monday, Silvergate Bank announced that it had acquired $182 million worth of Diem assets from the tech firm.