https://techmonitor.ai/policy/digital-economy/is-facebook-stablecoin-diem-doomed

Rare was the occasion when President Trump and Rep. Maxine Waters could agree on anything, but Facebook has a knack of bringing people together. The matter at hand was Libra, a new digital currency designed for use on the social network. In a statement on June 2019, the left-leaning chair of the House Financial Services Committee argued that Facebook had a poor record of data protection for its users, and the project shouldn’t expect consent from Congress until it clarified its intentions. Trump was sharper. Comparing Libra to other cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, which the president tweeted were “not money” and “based on thin air,” the president argued that if Facebook wanted to become a bank, it should be regulated like one.

It was a PR disaster for Facebook. In the preceding year, the company had been quietly recruiting dozens of international companies to embark on the Libra project, an attempt to create the first cryptocurrency with truly global reach. A type of ‘stablecoin,’ Libra was designed to avoid the volatility of Bitcoin or Ethereum by mirroring the value of a basket of global currencies. Through specially designed digital wallets, Facebook’s billion and a half users would be able to use it to buy and sell services on the platform, transforming it from a social network into a financial powerhouse.