The sun has set on the mighty Diem, Meta’s stablecoin project. While Meta formerly known as Facebook, changed even the name of the project from Libra to Diem, to gain favor from the regulators around the world, it could not officially launch the project. Diem is dead now and its co-founder, David Marcus, has quickly jumped on Bitcoin’s side and predicted it to become the number one asset in the next two decades.
Marcus commented that “Bitcoin will be the one asset and L1 still around in 20+ years with increased compounding relevance over time.” Meanwhile, he noted that the position to become the second-largest digital asset was still open despite Ethereum posing in the lead now.
While it is true that Ethereum has emerged as the leader of altcoins, it would be early to dismiss any competition. As mentioned by Marcus, Solana was already closing in on the technology and community aspects, but there were other worthy competitors for the second spot like Cardano and Polkadot.
Nevertheless, BTC remained “truly leaderless” and “censorship-resistant” for Marcus. It is always interesting to see this change of heart where top executives who started their crypto journey with different cryptos rush back to the roots of the technology and find their way to Bitcoin.
Marcus noted,
“Bitcoin is truly leaderless, censorship-resistant, and has much greater network effects. In essence, it’s unique and cannot ever be replicated. Its creation truly was the Big Bang event of crypto.”
Marcus, who was the former head of Meta’s crypto and fintech unit, Novi, stepped down from his position in late 2021. Nevertheless, Marcus remained a loyal Bitcoinist and is considered “one of the first top Silicon Valley executives to adopt and support Bitcoin.” In fact, he called Bitcoin a “digital gold” in 2019 after naming himself as a “big fan” of the largest digital asset.
Now that there was a full stop to Meta’s Diem project, many from the space are calling it a waste of time and effort, like Jack Dorsey. The former CEO of Twitter was of the view that the Meta could have worked on Bitcoin and made it more accessible than wasting years on Diem.
Dorsey, however, noted
“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.”
As the attention was once again shifting to the largest digital asset, the interest of the big pocket players was also increasing. As more cheerleaders for Bitcoin appear we may see a new wave of Bitcoin adoption and some may even start solving problems that have inhibited its adoption.