Jack Dorsey Says Meta Would Have Better Used Its Time on Bitcoin

Block CEO Jack Dorsey said that Meta should not have focused on its stablecoin project Diem, but bitcoin instead. Dorsey made the statement during a keynote speech during MicroStrategy’s Bitcoin for Corporations 2022 conference.

MicroStrategy held its Bitcoin for Corporations 2022 conference on Feb 1 and featured speaker Jack Dorsey and MicroStrategy CEO Michael Saylor offered a lot of thoughts on bitcoin. Of particular interest was Dorsey’s statement that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg should have focused on bitcoin and not its Diem stablecoin project.

Saylor and Dorsey, who is now the CEO of Block, led the Bitcoin Keynote speech, talking about the role of bitcoin in the world and its potential impact on corporations, among other things. Dorsey called the Diem project a failed one that led to wasted time.

Dorsey also spoke of what he was passionate about, one such idea being the fact that the “internet has a native currency of its own” — something he has mentioned before. He argued that such an asset would be important because,

“decisions made in Washington DC end up affecting people in Nigeria, which was not fair.”

He added that there were a lot of lessons to be learned with Diem’s stablecoin project,

“This whole thing with Libra and then Diem, I think there’s a ton of lessons there. Hopefully, they learned a lot, but I think there was a lot of wasted effort and time.”

Meta still working with crypto ideas

The Diem stablecoin’s assets and intellectual property have been sold by Meta to Silvergate, which will use the offerings to boost a stablecoin effort. The stablecoin project encountered several issues with regulators, who feared that it would give Meta (Facebook) too much influence. Meta has now joined the Crypto Open Patent Alliance to support the open development of crypto technologies.

Diem had undergone a rebranding and made several concessions to appease regulators to no avail. It even launched the Novi digital wallet but eventually resulted in selling anyway.

Meta’s focus on crypto has not disappeared, however. The company reportedly aims to launch an NFT marketplace on its platform and allow users to create and display NFTs on Instagram, though no official statements on these matters have been made.