- Block CEO Jack Dorsey has said that Meta’s Diem project was “wasted time and effort”
- Dorsey told Michael Saylor that the company should have worked on expanding Bitcoin instead
- Diem is being sold off after two years of development
Block CEO Jack Dorsey has said that there are a “ton of lessons” to be learned over Meta’s failed cryptocurrency, Diem. The intellectual property behind Diem, initially called Libra when it was announced in 2019, is on the verge of being sold to Silvergate Capital, and Dorsey took the opportunity of an interview with MicroStrategy CEO Michael Saylor to offer his opinion on where Meta went wrong, saying the company should have worked with Bitcoin instead.
“Wasted Time and Effort”
Dorsey was talking to Saylor at Bitcoin for Corporations 2022 when the subject of Diem came up. Dorsey stated that although Facebook started Diem for “the right reasons,” it was mistaken in focusing on a private currency that was never going to fly and should instead have worked with an open-ended protocol like Bitcoin:
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.
Meta Should Have Worked on Bitcoin, Says Dorsey
Dorsey went on to add that the three years Facebook (and then Meta) spent on developing Libra/Diem “could’ve been spent making Bitcoin more accessible for more people around the world”, something that he clearly feels would have been more viable.
Dorsey may have been critical of Meta’s approach to Diem, but he was never going to be too harsh on them – Meta just joined the Crypto Open Patent Alliance (COPA), a movement spearheaded by Dorsey’s company Square (now Block), making it an even more powerful orgnaization.
