Former Facebook stablecoin Libra leader David Marcus accuses US Treasury Secretary Yellen of behind the scenes strangling the project

David Marcus, former head of Facebook's stablecoin Libra and current co-founder and CEO of Lightspark, revealed in an article on the X platform how Libra was "strangled". He stated that Libra (then known as Diem) is an advanced, high-performance, payment centric blockchain with stablecoins developed in collaboration with the Meta (formerly Facebook) team, aimed at solving large-scale global payment problems. Before announcing the project, it took several months to brief major regulatory agencies in Washington and abroad, and then announced its launch in June 2019 with 28 companies. Two weeks later, David Marcus was summoned to testify before the Senate Banking Committee and the House Financial Services Committee, marking the beginning of two years of uninterrupted work and change aimed at appeasing lawmakers and regulators. By spring 2021, Libra had resolved all possible regulatory issues related to financial crime, money laundering, consumer protection, reserve management, and was ready to launch, with some members of the Federal Reserve Board also expressing support for it. Finally, Federal Reserve Chairman Jay Powell is preparing to push Libra forward in a limited way. However, US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen told Jay Powell during a biweekly meeting that allowing the project to proceed would be a "political suicide" and that if Jay Powell allowed it to happen, he would not support him. During the conversation, David Marcus expressed reservations about his absence, but in reality, this was the moment when Libra was being strangled. Shortly thereafter, the Federal Reserve organized a conference call with all participating banks, and the Federal Reserve's General Counsel read out a prepared statement to each bank, stating: 'We cannot prevent you (Libra) from advancing and launching, but we do not want you to do so' - and that's how it all came to an end. However, David Marcus said that the most important lesson learned from this is that if you want to build an open currency network for the world - ultimately transferring trillions of dollars every day, designed for 100 years - you must build it on the most neutral, decentralized, and unbreakable network and asset, undoubtedly Bitcoin.