With the termination of the Novi wallet pilot project in September, Meta’s initial journey into the cryptocurrency realm will come to an end.
The announcement that Novi, Meta’s wallet pilot, will terminate in September comes only days after Mark Zuckerberg promotes Meta Pay on Facebook.
The pilot users’ information page on Novi’s website has been updated to let them know that the platform will be shut down on September 1. This concludes an eight-month pilot study that saw consumers test the cryptocurrency-based payment systems in Guatemala and the United States.
Users are instructed to transfer any remaining money in their individual Novi wallets to the associated bank accounts. Users from Guatemala can also cash out their funds at a few specific locations in Guatemala City.
Users of Novi are urged to download their account data, including transactions and activity on their accounts, before the shutdown date. Users won’t be able to access their wallets after September 1. Beginning on July 21, deposits into Novi wallets will likewise be stopped.
The Novi pilot’s shutdown comes about five months after Silvergate Capital Corporation acquired the Diem stablecoin project from Meta. Diem was once planned to be the native currency of the Novi wallet and was to serve as the stablecoin that drove the Meta ecosystem.
The intellectual property of Diem was sold by Meta to Silvergate as a result of regulatory pressure in the US. Silvergate planned to incorporate the underlying blockchain infrastructure and assets into its current payment platform.
Due to Diem’s inability to launch, Novi now uses the Paxos-powered stablecoin Pax Dollar (USDP) instead of its own native, dollar-backed currency. To monitor and hold customer cash, the American bitcoin exchange Coinbase partnered with Novi as its custodial partner. Once it received regulatory approval, Meta had intended to move the Novi platform to the Diem blockchain ecosystem.
The Novi pilot is about to come to an end, and Mark Zuckerberg, the creator of Meta, announced the switch from Facebook Pay to Meta Pay on his public Facebook profile on June 22. Except for the advent of a digital wallet for the metaverse “that allows you securely manage your identity, what you own, and how you pay,” the functionality will mostly remain unchanged.
It has been a difficult process for Meta to include cryptocurrencies and stablecoins into its ecosystem. The parent corporation of Facebook changed its name to Meta, and the Diem ecosystem likewise experienced a disastrous rebranding from Libra as a result of strong opposition from international regulators.
