Facebook abandons its ambitious plan to open cryptocurrencies to the general public.
The Diem Association, the consortium created by Facebook in 2019 to build a futuristic payments network, is shutting down and its technology assets have been sold for $ 200 million to a small California bank that services companies for Bitcoin and Blockchain.
This was reported by the Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal citing some sources.
The sale to Silvergate Capital will likely allow Facebook to return some of the funds to the founding members of the initiative, who had initially pledged to pay $ 10 million.
The Facebook project immediately met with opposition from the authorities, and suffered a severe blow with the
Meanwhile, the EU Antitrust has approved with conditions the proposed acquisition of Kustomer, a US start-up specialized in customer service and automatic chat bots, by Meta (formerly Facebook).
"The commitments offered by Meta ensure that its rivals will continue to have free and comparable access to its important messaging channels," said EU vice president Margrethe Vestager.
Today's decision follows an in-depth investigation into the operation that the EU Antitrust had initiated last August.
