In 2021, U.S. regulators killed Facebook’s Diem stablecoin project with a phone call. No law, no court order, just the Fed’s General Counsel Mark Van Der Weide dialling Diem’s CEO Stuart Leve and its banking partners with a message that landed like a cease-and-desist.
Fast forward four years: Meta is back. But they aren’t minting a coin this time. Instead, they are renting Stripe’s stablecoin plumbing to turn WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook into a 3B user global settlement layer. And, this is the foundational infrastructure for a multi-trillion-dollar AI economy. [NEWS]
