Former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey said that Meta’s (formerly Facebook) cryptocurrency project Diem was “wasted effort and time.” Dorsey was speaking to MicroStrategy CEO Michael Saylor on Tuesday at “Bitcoin for Corporations 2022” conference.
Dorsey said that “those two years or three years, or however long it’s been”, could have been spent making “Bitcoin more accessible for more people around the world,” which would also benefit Meta’s “Messenger product and Instagram and WhatsApp.” This development comes after a Bloomberg report said that Diem’s CEO Stuart Levey announced the sale of Diem’s assets, citing continuing resistance from federal regulators.
When Saylor asked Dorsey how Bitcoin could assist corporations in solving some fundamental problems, to which Dorsey says that the internet having a native currency opens many doors for “internet companies, technology companies, but more importantly for everyday people, activists, people who have questions in the world, curiosity, and recognizing that the currency systems just aren’t working for them”.
“They tried to create a currency that was owned by Facebook — probably for the right reasons, probably for noble reasons — but there were also some reasons that would indicate trying to get more and more people onto the Facebook ecosystem. They did that instead of using an open protocol and standard like Bitcoin,” Dorsey added.
It should be noted Dorsey left Twitter in December to focus on digital payment firm Block—making Parag Agrawal, the new CEO of Twitter. More recently, he also announced that his fintech startup Block (formerly known as Square) is building a system to make it easier for people to mine Bitcoin. The tech evangelist on Twitter revealed that Block is “officially building an open Bitcoin mining system.”
Dorsey is a staunch Bitcoin supporter. His love for cryptocurrency dates back to 2017 when he started advocating Bitcoin as the king coin. When the crypto market crashed in 2018, Dorsey was unfazed, calling Bitcoin the future world currency, despite the digital currency being at its lowest point in several years. In March 2019, Dorsey had said that he spends several thousand dollars each week to buy Bitcoin.
Meanwhile, in November 2020, Dorsey released the whitepaper of its decentralized Bitcoin exchange proposal— tbDEX. The project aims to make Bitcoin the native currency for the Internet. “In order to achieve this, the nature of financial institutions needs to evolve. We can either embrace this change — by investing in this future as a public good by rethinking our business models and ways to create value — or we can let this future happen to us,” the company wrote in a blog post.