Meta is pulling the plug on its crypto payments wallet, Novi | Hacker News Reader

Meta is pulling the plug on its crypto payments wallet, Novi

techcrunch.com

60 pointsaruanavekar16 comments

Lol right before I quit Meta last year my team was told to drop everything and focus 100% on integrating our product with the Novi wallet.

Whatever my old teammates have been working on for the last 8 months just got trash canned.

Constant product thrash was one of the worst parts about working there, I guess not much has changed

One thing about Meta and Google as well to a certain degree, is that they don't seem to see things through. A few quarters of sub-optimal results and they just trash the idea.

It's a shame, because often times sticking to something is what eventually makes it become a success if the market was not ready for it at the time that it was released.

That being said they have some really bad ideas too.

Meta poured a ton of resources into Libra/Diem and Novi and got shut down hard by regulators. I don’t blame them for moving on from this idea: the political costs aren’t worth it.

Of course there’s a secondary implication: a lot of people clearly though that Libra/Diem/Novi would have been a serious threat to legacy payments businesses if it hadn’t been killed. I think that’s pretty interesting and I’m curious to see who steps into the void that regulators have just scooped out.

I am not sure there is a void in the crypto space that otherwise would have been filled by Novi. Even a more centralized (federated?) coin like that would still inherit major shortcomings of blockchain-based digital currencies.

Also looks like even Meta eventually decided to pivot to a more traditional digital offering “Zuck Bucks”.

I’m not sure it follows that people thought “Libra/Diem/Novi” would be a threat to the payments business. Personally at the time I thought having payments be at the mercy of a ruthless data monetization cartel seemed like a terrible idea, and it could be it was shut down for reasons along those lines.

When you use the phrase “having payments be at the mercy of [Facebook]” you’re pretty much granting the premise that the project could have seen major adoption -- and that's significant given that its sole justification was to provide an alternative to legacy payments tech. If everyone thought Libra/Diem/Novi was going to crash and burn, there wouldn’t have been so much emphasis on preventing its launch (over perfectly reasonable concerns.)

According to Wikipedia, Meta started exploring crypto as early as 2017. So ending the effort in 2022 after several rebrandings and a huge legal pushback is fairly expected.

I get that they need to try new ideas. I also get that continuing to support a failed product doesn’t make business sense.

That being said, I have a hard time getting excited about new releases from these companies, and I have no expectations of them sticking around. Why would I try something that will likely be pulled out from under me if I use it and like it?

I much prefer Apple’s approach. They seem much more intentional about what they release and a while they have had their failures (like Ping), I can usually count on stuff they release getting support and sticking around.

This is a bit different, crypto was always a dumb idea but Facebook was hoping to ride some hype/trend train towards… ?

I don’t think this is a case where they should have continued to invest.

I hope metaverse does not go the same way as Libra/Novi. If that happens somehow I think Meta will face an existential threat. I think Zuck understands this.

The metaverse existed long before Facebook's interest in (pretending like they invented) it, and it'll likely be around long after Facebook fails at it.

I don't know why they just don't buy Venmo

Paypal owns it

they could buy Paypal

FB buying PayPal would instantly devalue it significantly.

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