Tech giant, Meta, is shutting down its digital wallet, Novi.
There is a notice on the Novi website that states that the “Novi Pilot is ending soon.” It also states that “Novi will no longer be available for use after September 1” and and asks users to withdraw their funds “as soon as possible.”
Formerly known as Calibra, Novi was introduced as a digital wallet that will help people send and hold Diem (formerly know as Libra) digital currencies. In October 2021, a Novi pilot was rolled out to users in the US and Guatemala. Even though Novi was originally built to support transactions using Diem, it faced regulatory challenges which forced it to partner with Coinbase to use the Paxos stablecoin (USDP) instead.
However the project has been bedevilled with one issue or the other. Immediately the pilot was announced, US Senate Democrats called on Facebook to kill its digital wallet and cryptocurrency project saying that the company “cannot be trusted to manage cryptocurrency.” David Marcus, the head of Meta’s cryptocurrency projects, quit a month later. Diem sold its assets for about $200 million at the beginning of this year, marking an end to the project.
Despite the call, the company continued with WhatsApp testing crypto payments with Novi in the US six weeks later. Some people in the United States were sending and receiving money from inside of a Whatsapp chat using cryptocurrency.
Shutting down Novi shows that it has given up. However Meta says it will use the technology it developed as part of the project “on new products, such as digital collectibles” as it looks towards “building the metaverse.”
