Meta dumps its crypto-wallet after less than a year

Facebook is the world’s de facto social media platform, but in recent years has been tilting at meta-windmills as part of founder Mark Zuckerberg’s drive towards the metaverse. It’s easy enough to laugh at the cringe videos of virtual meetings and the notion we’ll all spend our days in a shittier version of PlayStation Home, but Meta-nee-Facebook’s size means that it can put significant backing behind the projects it believes in.

One of these was Novi, a money-transfer service based around Meta’s proprietary crypto-wallet. The Novi pilot launched in October 2021 but was itself something of a backwards step: where Meta once intended to back its own cryptocurrency, Diem, congressional scrutiny led to Zuckerberg promising it would only do so with regulatory approval. Diem’s assets were sold by Meta in January 2021.

Novi didn’t use Diem, instead plumping for Paxos Trust Co.’s USDP ‘stablecoin’ and allowing users in the US and Guatemala into the scheme. Now Meta has announced on the service’s website that it will be shutting down on September 1, 2022, less than a year after the pilot began.

The Novi app and Novi on WhatsApp will shut down and, as of July 21, customers will not be able to add funds to their wallets. The service provides full instructions on how to withdraw any balance: one of the few benefits, I suppose, of something like this being backed by Meta.