Facebook confirms that the firm is preparing to create a digital wallet that would allow users to store cryptocurrency.
The director of Facebook’s crypto team, David Marcus, told the information News site that company officials “feel pretty committed” to launching the Novi digital wallet this year.
Marcus stated that he would have wanted to release Novi concurrently with Diem, a digital currency connected to the dollar that the company is also developing, but Diem’s release date remained unknown.
“In theory, Novi could launch before Diem, but it would mean launching without Diem and that’s not necessarily something that we want to do,” Marcus says. “It all depends on how long it’s going to take for Diem to actually go live and that’s not something I’m personally looking after.”
In 2019, Facebook announced plans to launch a cryptocurrency known at the time as Libra. However, regulatory resistance arose because of concerns about security and dependability.