Libra Rebrands to Become ‘Diem’

The Libra Association has rebranded itself as the Diem Association, its payment service operator will be called Diem Networks and its currency the Diem Dollar. Its Calibra blockchain group, responsible for the digital wallet that will hold the Diem Dollar, has already been renamed Novi.

The original goal was to have a 100-organisation association, but this objective has been abandoned and it currently has 27 members. It is worth mentioning that the original members included the likes of Visa, MasterCard, Stripe and PayPal, big payment players. They are gone, replaced by non-traditional financial partners and innovators, Uber, Lyft, Spotify, Shopify etc.

The original scheme was criticised by regulators for its impact on financial stability, privacy and money laundering concerns and more. It had been going to launch a stablecoin ‘currency’ backed by a basket of currencies, but this has been scaled back to being a single stablecoin pegged to the US dollar.

The plan remains to launch as early as January 2021; the press speculation is that all of these changes are a response to the opposition to the initial plans and to bring the scheme within regulatory structures.

It is also an attempt to create distance between Facebook and their stablecoin currency to make it more acceptable to regulators around the world.