After abandoning its diem (ex-libra) cryptocurrency earlier this year, Meta is preparing to terminate its Novi digital wallet, the last piece of its crypto project.
Lately, it is not good to associate crypto and Meta in the same sentence. Indeed, after the abandonment of its diem (ex-libra) cryptocurrency project, Meta announces that it will abandon its Novi digital wallet project.
On its site, we learn that Novi will be closed on September 1st and that it will no longer be possible to deposit money there from July 21st. Users are thus urged to move their funds as soon as possible. If the money is not moved by the time the wallet is closed, Meta “will try to [le] to transfer” on the associated card or bank account.
Initially dedicated to diem (ex-libra), project of stablecoin launched by Facebook, which was met with global outcry, the Novi digital wallet was finally launched in pilot version in October 2021 with the pax dollar (USDP) in the United States and Guatemala, before being tested on WhatsApp.
Members of the US Senate had asked Meta to shut down its wallet shortly after its launch last October. They felt that Meta “not [pouvait] not be reliable to manage cryptocurrencies”. A month later, David Marcus, the head of crypto projects at Meta, left the ship.
Despite the abandonment of Novi, Lauren Dickson, spokesperson for Meta, explained to our colleagues from The Verge that the firm intended to use the technology developed within the framework of the project “on new products”in order to “build the metaverse”.
As a reminder, on June 22, Mark Zuckerberg announced that Meta was working on an interoperable metaverse, an allusion to the creation of a single digital wallet allowing users to manage their identity and their (virtual) objects.