The demand for chips continues to be strong, and the world’s top 10 semiconductor factories, including TSMC, recorded a new high in net profit last quarter, but the operating environment faces three hidden concerns, including the “Ukrainian situation”.
Nikkei reported on the 5th that due to the strong demand for chips, the world’s top 10 semiconductor manufacturers such as TSMC, Samsung Electronics, and Nvidia boosted the total net profit last quarter (October-December 2021, and some are November 2021-January 2022). The value reached 36.6 billion US dollars, a sharp increase of 30% over the same period last year, setting a record high for the same period since 2011 for which data can be continuously compared.
The report pointed out that due to the Metaverse and carbon reduction business opportunities, the demand for chips is expected to continue to be strong in the future, but the operating environment of semiconductor manufacturers has begun to change, and they are facing three hidden worries, namely increased investment, talent shortage and the situation in Ukraine. Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger (Pat Gelsinger) said, “In the semiconductor industry, no matter who you are, you are facing problems such as rapid inflation and rising manufacturing costs.” Although Intel and TSMC’s revenue increased in the last quarter, their net profit rate shrank. Among them, TSMC’s net profit rate was about 38%, down more than 1 percentage point from the same period last year.
According to reports, the cost of building new factories and developing next-generation chips has increased, and excellent engineers are indispensable for increasing production or developing next-generation technologies. In order to compete for talents, personnel costs have also increased significantly. This is also seen as This is one of the reasons why TSMC’s net profit rate fell last quarter.
The report pointed out that the deteriorating situation in Ukraine and the procurement of rare resources for semiconductors are also a concern. Neon gas, which is indispensable for semiconductor manufacturing, depends on Ukraine for 70% of the supply. Although the Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA) stated that “there is no immediate risk of supply chain interruption”, countermeasures such as alternative procurement will become the focus in the future. According to the calculation of Morgan Stanley in the United States, the neon gas inventory of Taiwan’s semiconductor companies is 6 months’ consumption. If the war is prolonged, the inventory alone will not be able to guarantee the supply, and the procurement crisis will intensify.
The subjects included in the Nikkei statistics include TSMC, Nvidia, Samsung Electronics, Broadcom, Qualcomm, Intel, AMD, Texas Instruments, Micron and SK Hynix.
British IC design company Graphcore announced the launch of a new AI processor called Bow Intelligence Processing Unit, or Bow IPU for short. This is the third-generation IPU of Graphcore, which provides core computing power for the next-generation Bow Pod AI computer system, which can achieve 40% performance improvement and 16% energy consumption improvement compared to the old system. The most special feature of Bow IPU is the world’s first 3D wafer (Wafer-on-Wafer, WoW) packaged processor, produced by TSMC, the leading foundry.
Graphcore said that based on the design and manufacture of the Bow IPU, Graphcore worked closely with TSMC to use a 7-nanometer process, and then use 3D stacking technology to combine two wafers into one to achieve performance and energy efficiency improvements. Bow IPUs demonstrate the feasibility of transferring chip performance improvements from advanced technology to advanced packaging. In the future, TSMC will also provide similar technologies to other customers, so that 3D packaging technology will gradually popularize consumer chips.
According to Graphcore, the Bow IPU has 1,472 independent processor cores, can process 8,832 independent parallel programs, more than 60 billion transistors in a single package, 0.9GB memory storage and computing power of 65TB/s, 10 IPU-Links provide 320GB/s The interconnection bandwidth can achieve 350TeraFLOPS artificial intelligence computing. In order to achieve 3D stacking, the new chip adds nearly 600 million transistors, which not only increases computing power, but also optimizes the power structure.
The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) National Laboratory Pacific Northwest (PNNL) will be one of the first customers to use Bow IPUs to improve performance and energy consumption, expected for applications such as chemical computing and cybersecurity. The person in charge said that he is excited to use the new system to try to push the boundaries of machine learning and graph neural networks to solve scientific problems that are difficult to solve with existing technologies.
Uber, the world’s leading ride-hailing platform, revised up its fiscal forecast for the first quarter of 2022 on the 7th, citing that the impact of the Omicron epidemic is fading faster than expected. Encouraged by the optimistic financial forecast, Uber’s stock price rose more than 6% in early trading, but it was weak at the end and closed down 4.22%.
According to CNBC, The Wall Street Journal and other foreign media reports, according to Uber’s filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), it is expected that adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization (EBITDA) in the first quarter of 2022 will be between $130 million to $150 million, better than the original forecast of $100 million to $130 million.
Uber said that the demand for ride-hailing and food delivery increased significantly in February. The number of ride-hailing orders (Trips) returned to 90% in February 2019, and the total bookings (Gross Bookings) also returned to 95% in February 2019. . Gross bookings are the total value of Uber’s ride-hailing and delivery orders (in US dollars).
Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said: “Demand continues to grow steadily, whether traveling, commuting or overnight trips, reflecting consumers’ desire to get out and about. In fact, total bookings from airport transfers jumped more than 50% in February compared to January. , we are preparing for the upcoming peak tourist season, which is expected to be one of the strongest on record.”
Airport transfers are one of Uber’s biggest beneficiaries. In 2021, 11% of Uber’s total bookings came from airport transfers, up from 15% in 2019, according to SEC filings.
Shares of Uber fell 4.22% to close at $28.57 on the 7th as a surge in oil prices triggered a sell-off in the stock market. Uber shares have fallen 46.30% in the past 12 months.
Tesla announced today that it will fully switch to the Tesla Vision self-driving system, including the high-end Model S and Model X, and will also bid farewell to in-vehicle radar.
Tesla said that starting in mid-February 2022, the Model S and Model X produced in the North American market will have the Tesla Vision system enabled. In other words, these two high-end cars will no longer be equipped with radar.
Starting in May 2021, Tesla has begun to introduce Tesla Vision, an autonomous driving software that relies entirely on cameras and computer calculations, and does not require other sensors. The first models to be launched were the Model 3 and Model Y, and now high-end models will join the ranks.
In the process of autonomous driving development, automakers and software manufacturers around the world are divided into two camps. One is Tesla, which believes that computer vision can do all the work that the human eye can handle without the assistance of other sensors; the other is Tesla. Manufacturers other than Latin America believe that computer operations are limited and must rely on lidar, radar, ultrasonic, infrared and other sensors to assist in checking speed, distance and other factors, and with high-precision maps, in order to achieve true autonomous driving.
As of now, no manufacturer has achieved Level 5 fully autonomous driving, so it is too early to say which one will win, but Tesla Vision has passed the safety verification amid many doubts. At the end of 2021, both IIHS and Consumer Reports gave Model Y the highest safety rating for the pure vision solution, proving that it can have the same effect as radar and lidar with only cameras.
At present, only the Model S and Model X in the North American market will use Tesla Vision, and other regions will still have radar, but according to Tesla’s style, Tesla’s entire car series will soon bid farewell to radar.
Coinbase, a well-known cryptocurrency exchange, released its latest financial report after the US stock market on the 24th. Both revenue and profit were better than market expectations, but it warned that trading volume in the first quarter would decline. Shares of Coinbase fell more than 5 percent in after-hours trading that day.
According to the financial report released by Coinbase, revenue in the fourth quarter of 2021 jumped to $2.5 billion, compared with $585.1 million in the same period of 2020, which was higher than the $1.94 billion expected in a Refinitiv survey; net profit soared to $840.2 million from $176.8 million in the same period of 2020 $3.32 per diluted share, also beating the Wall Street consensus estimate of $1.85.
Coinbase’s revenue and profit performance are highly dependent on the popularity of the cryptocurrency market. As of the fourth quarter of 2021, Coinbase Verified Users (Verified Users) increased to 89 million, and Monthly Transacting Users (MTU) reached 11.4 million, a significant increase from 7.4 million in the third quarter.
Coinbase’s revenue mainly comes from transaction fees, unlike stock brokers who can earn interest income through user account balances, so MTU is an important indicator to observe Coinbase’s operations.
According to Coinbase’s earnings report, bitcoin accounted for 16% of total trading volume in the fourth quarter, ethereum accounted for 16%, and the remaining 68% came from other crypto assets, up from 59% in the third quarter.
Looking ahead to the first quarter of 2022, Coinbase forecasts that MTU and trading volume will be lower than in the fourth quarter of 2021, citing weakness in the cryptocurrency market, which has plunged 20% so far in the first quarter, mainly due to geopolitical tensions, coupled with the U.S. The Federal Reserve (Fed) released a hawkish signal, causing the prices of cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin to dip.
According to Yahoo Finance’s quotation, Coinbase’s stock price rose 3.95% in normal trading on the 24th to close at $179.56, and fell 5.83% to $169.10 after the market.
Out of confidence in its own ARC GPU product line, Intel is planning a Project Endgame cloud computing platform based on the ARC independent graphics architecture, with a view to providing various graphics-intensive services over the Internet. In a recent investor presentation, the chip giant revealed that it is “on schedule” to release related products from its Accelerated Computing Systems and Graphics Group (AXG).
It is reported that Project Endgame allows users to access Intel ARC GPUs through this service for a low-latency computing experience that is always accessible. If all goes well, it is expected to launch later this year.
Based on the two-line short official description, we don’t know exactly what Intel is brewing, but judging from the naming rules, it should cover areas such as cloud game streaming.
Thanks to the low-latency features, customers will not need conventional hardware for every occasion, and it is similar to competing services such as Nvidia GeForce Now, Amazon Luna, Microsoft xCloud, Sony PlayStation Now, Google Stadia and others.
Intel made it clear, however, that it wasn’t pointing out that Project Endgame would be aimed primarily at gamers, in addition to a number of remote hosting-based streaming services.
Some speculate that, as the company’s biggest bet of the year, Intel will be able to provide workstations with cloud-based computing solutions (or something akin to Microsoft Windows 365 cloud PCs) as long as the ARC GPUs are powerful enough.
Even if the original ARC Alchemist GPU can’t compete with NVIDIA GeForce RTX / AMDRadeon RX high-end discrete graphics, at least it can gain a place in the red and green-dominated discrete graphics market.
Since the poor performance of Meta’s fourth-quarter financial report, the stock price has plummeted, and the decline has expanded on the 17th. The market value even dropped out of the top ten companies in the world by market value, losing to TSMC and Tencent, ranking 11th.
Meta was once the sixth largest company in the world, with a market value of more than $1 trillion, but its stock price fell 4.08% to $207.71 on the 17th, leaving a market value of $565 billion, down 46% from its peak in September last year, evaporating more than $500 billion in market value.
According to data compiled by Bloomberg, Meta has now retreated to 11th place, behind TSMC in ninth place and Tencent in tenth place. Meta’s original sixth position has been replaced by Tesla, whose market value has risen to $906 billion. .
The world’s largest company by market value is still Apple, with a value of US$2.8 trillion, followed by Microsoft; the third to fifth are Saudi Aramco (Aramco), Alphabet, Amazon; the seventh and eighth are Berkshire Hathaway, Huizhou up.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced last year that Facebook would be renamed Meta, symbolizing his determination to enter the Metaverse, but the fourth-quarter earnings report was affected by Apple’s adjustment of privacy policies and supply chain issues, and the number of daily active users declined for the first time. Profits are not as expected.
What will the car of the future look like? At present, many manufacturers and individuals are working hard to explore, and there is no consensus on their views, but there is a consensus on one thing: fully automatic driving.
Today, there are many companies in the world that have more in-depth research on autonomous driving, such as Google, Baidu, and Huawei. In terms of car companies, Tesla is the most well-known.
Since last year, Tesla’s fully-autonomous driving FSD Beta has been tested on the road. It has been more than a year and accumulated a lot of experience. This is also the capital of Musk’s frequent “guts.”
At the end of last month, at the Tesla earnings conference, Musk also announced a blockbuster news that Tesla will achieve fully autonomous driving this year!
However, Volkswagen Group CEO Herbert Diess clearly has a different view. In an interview with the media this Wednesday, he made it clear that the auto industry will see the popularity of autonomous driving technology within 25 years.
He also said Volkswagen was seeking further cooperation to increase its self-sufficiency in software and add features such as brand-specific voice assistants to its cars.
Interestingly, at the same time, there was news that Volkswagen was planning to acquire Huawei’s autonomous driving unit for a multi-billion-euro deal.
Musk said that fully autonomous driving can be achieved this year, while Diess gave a figure of 25 years. The gap between the two was too large, which caused heated discussions among netizens.
Some people say that Musk is not credible, because every time he is asked how long Tesla will be able to achieve full self-driving, the answer he gives is always 1 year. This response has started since 2014. In 2017, Ma Ske said in public that Level 5 autonomous driving will arrive in a few months, and the same words were reiterated in 2018, but back to being slapped in the face by reality.
Some people also swear that after watching the video of Tesla’s fully autonomous driving on the road, what Musk said is true, and it will be realized soon.
Google announced on the 16th that it will create a Privacy Sandbox for the Android system, which will reduce the ability of apps on Android phones to track user behavior. Prior to this, Apple has taken similar actions, proposing “App Tracking Transparency” (ATT) for the iOS system and launching it for a period of time, subverting the current practice of advertising technology for many years, and making advertising the main source of revenue. Meta, the parent company of Facebook, jumped. However, in the face of Android’s privacy sandbox, Meta expressed its willingness to support Google’s implementation of privacy adjustments.
More than 90% of the apps on Google Play are currently free to use, and billions of users access important content and services through these apps; the key to the free use of these apps is to support app development and operation through digital advertising . However, in order to ensure the sound development of the app ecosystem, the industry must continue to improve digital advertising operations to protect user privacy, which is why Google originally developed advertising IDs to provide users with more control. Google shared its efforts to improve these controls last year, but still believes that protecting privacy must go further.
Gogole builds Android’s privacy sandbox Google announced on the 16th a multi-year plan to create a privacy sandbox for Android, based on Google’s existing network technology achievements, the goal is to introduce new advertising solutions, further protect user privacy, and allow users to continue Access free content and services. These solutions limit the sharing of user data with third parties and work without cross-app ID identification, including advertising IDs. Google will also continue to develop new technologies, such as apps that can more securely integrate the advertising SDK to reduce the possibility of surreptitiously collecting data.
From now on, developers can go to the Android Developers site to view Google’s initial proposal and provide feedback. Google expects to launch a developer preview this year and a beta test version by the end of the year. It will also provide regular updates on the design and schedule. Google also said that while designing, developing and testing new solutions, it will maintain the existing advertising platform functions for at least 2 years, which means that other companies have time to adjust.
Not only is Google committed to working closely with regulators, but it also has a public commitment to a privacy sandbox for web services, including no special treatment for Google ad products or websites, and these principles apply to Android products as well. The move is not difficult to see, as consumers and lawmakers become more concerned about how personal data is used, Google’s various protections for user privacy are expected to help the technology giant face regulatory problems.
The most opinionated Meta voices support for Google Such a policy change is likely to affect some of the big tech companies that rely on tracking individual usage across apps or websites owned by other companies and monetizing them with ad serving, most notably Meta.
Apple’s ATT mechanism has been implemented with the launch of iOS 14.5, which has dealt a heavy blow to the Meta advertising business. Meta’s financial report this month said that Apple’s new privacy policy will reduce Meta’s advertising revenue by about $10 billion. As soon as the news came out, Meta’s stock price plummeted and its market value evaporated by as much as $232 billion in one day. The largest loss in a single day, the total market value once fell below 600 billion US dollars.
Although Meta opposes Apple’s new privacy regime, it is willing to support Google’s implementation of privacy adjustments.
Graham Mudd, vice president of Meta, Facebook advertising and commerce product marketing, pointed out on his personal Twitter account that he is happy to see Google adopt this long-term, collaborative approach to provide privacy-protecting personalized advertising, and he also expressed his expectation to continue to work with Google and the industry as a whole. Collaborate to enhance privacy technologies together.
On the other hand, while not naming names, Google’s article on its official blog implicitly criticized Apple’s approach. Google points out that the advertising privacy protection mechanism adopted by “other platforms” focuses on limiting the tools currently used by developers and advertisers, which it believes is different from Google because this mechanism does not first provide an alternative privacy protection method. , the effect may not be as expected, and may also have a negative impact on user privacy and developer work. Google hopes to develop an advertising solution that effectively strengthens privacy protection mechanisms through Android’s privacy sandbox. In addition to allowing users to be sure that their personal data is protected, it also provides developers and businesses with appropriate tools to assist them in mobile devices. achieve the desired goal.
For many years, Facebook seems to be a company whose “superstition” can change its fate by changing its name. It’s a pity that Mark Zuckerberg is not good at this. When he changed his name, his luck declined all the way.
Last Wednesday, Facebook announced its first financial report after officially changing its name to Meta. It closed at $323 per share on the day of the earnings report. After the earnings report was released, it fell all the way to $253 per share after the market, a drop of about 22%. If you read the financial report carefully, you will find that the Metaverse behind the name Meta is the culprit that “dragged down” this financial report-because of its huge investment in the metaverse field, its operating profit in 2021 will be reduced by about 10 billion USD, a net loss of USD 10.19 billion for the year. The news that the business will not be profitable in the short term has sent the stock price all the way down.
It can be said that this wave of name changes did not have any good effect. But this is definitely not the most “unlucky” name change. Behind another major name change of Meta is a story full of bitter tears. At the end of 2020, after Facebook announced that the digital currency Libra project would be renamed Diem, the beginning of the project was very good. The project of large global companies squeezed their heads and hugged their legs to join the project fell all the way to the bottom, and even officially marked a stop with the sale of business this week. . The whole story is full of tragic colors – the “betrayal” of allies, the “humiliation” of various governments, and the departure of the elite team, and this is not the worst part of Zuckerberg’s “coin issuance” dream.
The sale announced that the dream of issuing coins was broken Now, when users open the official website of Libra (later renamed Diem), which Meta used to shout desperately in 2019, they will find such a pop-up advertisement, which is a statement issued by Diem CEO Stuart Levey:
The Diem Association announced the sale of its intellectual property rights and other assets related to the operation of the Diem payment network to Silvergate Capital Corporation.
“Through this transaction, we believe that Silvergate will be able to continue to advance the vision of Diem (promoting stablecoins). In the next short period of time, the Diem Association will gradually dissolve its subsidiaries.”
Notably, the Diem-accepting Silvergate bank was one of the first banks in the US willing to open an account for cryptocurrency trading back in 2014. In addition, this company is also an important strategic partner of Facebook after transferring the Diem project from Switzerland to the United States in 2020, and has become the exclusive issuer of Diem’s USD stablecoin at important nodes, and manages Diem’s USD reserves.
According to The Verge, the deal between Diem and Silvergate is valued at around $200 million.
Meanwhile, in the announcement, Diem attributed its failure to government obstruction. They stated in the announcement: “Although we have given positive and substantive feedback to the government’s questioning, we have found from communication with the US federal government regulator that this project has not been able to proceed normally. Therefore, for Diem, The best outcome is to sell it.” And after the deal, the Diem Association will gradually withdraw from the entire project.
At this point, Meta and Zuckerberg’s dream of issuing coins was officially announced. And this group of elite employees that Facebook has hunted around the world is also facing the end of the team’s dissolution.
Libra gets off to a bang Although it ended badly, this project was almost born with a golden spoon in it.
In the summer of 2019, Facebook took a digital currency white paper like thunder, announcing that it will release the digital currency Libra and its supporting digital wallet Calibra in the second year. Although looking back carefully, to a certain extent, the stable virtual currency Libra was a challenge to various virtual currencies such as Bitcoin, which was chaotic and fluctuated at the time, but the news of giants joining the currency circle still made the “currency circle” at that time. The people of the faith felt unprecedented excitement and hope.
Unlike other cryptocurrencies at the time, the price of the stable electronic coin Libra did not fluctuate dramatically. To put it simply, according to the idea in the Facebook white paper at the time, the value of Libra will be linked to a fixed currency, and only the Libra Management Association has the power to issue and destroy currency according to currency exchange.
In addition, in the white paper, Facebook stated that in addition to being unable to mine at will, users cannot use Libra currency to be completely anonymous, nor completely untraceable.
These measures are largely aimed at reassuring the U.S. government and the Federal Reserve to eliminate opposition from government departments.
In the description, Facebook stated that its mission is to build a simple global currency and financial infrastructure that will be used for global payments and transfers in the future, making cross-border transfers as simple as sending a text message, and without all the complexity fee.
In addition to the white paper full of rhetoric, another important reason why the Libra project was able to attract the attention of the world at that time was that besides Facebook, Libra’s alliance companies were too powerful – from payment platforms Mastarcard, PayPal, Stripe, Visa to e-commerce platforms Shopify, eBay, Farfatch, to blockchain companies such as Coinbase, and even top Silicon Valley investment banks a16z, Union Square Ventures and Ribbit Capital are its supporters and participants.
It can be said that Facebook almost pulled half of Silicon Valley to cheer for it. And these small giants in the fields of finance and technology are also looking forward to a piece of the big layout that uses technology to subvert the traditional financial industry and even the status of legal currency.
A congressional inquiry turns the wheel of fortune While the project had a prosperous start, it soon turned the wheel of its fortunes completely by a congressional inquiry.
In July 2019, shortly after the release of the white paper, Facebook faced opposition from numerous governments. The reason behind this is that governments of various countries are worried that their fiat currency will be impacted by Facebook’s currency issuance, and the United States is even more afraid that its global currency hegemony will be shaken.
The first country to stand up against it was France. French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire said that the Libra digital currency should not be regarded as a substitute for traditional currencies. “It is impossible for Libra to become a sovereign currency,” he said, worrying that Libra may bring about issues such as privacy, money laundering and terrorist financing. In addition, he is also worried that the rise of Libra may even bring shocks and risks to the global financial system.
However, the biggest stumbling block for Facebook to issue coins came from the U.S. government.
In July 2019, the U.S. House of Representatives issued a request to terminate the Libra project. Then, the U.S. Senate Banking Housing and Urban Physical Committee held a hearing on the Libra project. At that time, it was Libra head David Marcus (see the picture below) who participated in the hearing.
David is mentioned because he is almost the soul of the Libra project. This executive is from Geneva, Switzerland, and this is also seen by many outsiders as one of the reasons why the Libra project was registered in Switzerland in the early days.
David has been in continuous business since 1996. The four companies it founded were all acquired. Finally, when Zong, the payment company he founded, was acquired by PayPal, he chose to join PayPal and became the chairman of PayPal within three years. At the time, he was pretty much the leader in payments among U.S. tech companies. After joining Facebook, he was in charge of the Messenger team, and eventually became the most important role in Zuckerberg’s dream of issuing coins, the Libra project leader.
In fact, this is not the first time Facebook has faced questions from the hearing in a short period of time at the time. The previous year, Zuckerberg had faced similarly tough questions about disinformation, data breaches and daring to vote. These past records have made the U.S. government’s trust in Facebook drop to a very low level at the beginning of Libra’s launch. Looking back at this tense inquiry today, I can still feel how sharp the questions raised by the lawmakers at that time were.
“How many elected lawmakers will stand up against Libra before Facebook will let it go?” asked Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown. On the same day, lawmakers continued to ask questions about the jurisdictional issues, privacy protection issues, and Facebook’s trust crisis brought about by Facebook’s coin offering.
Most of the doubts about jurisdiction in the U.S. Congress revolved around Facebook’s decision to set up Libra’s headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland. In the eyes of Congress, a U.S. company’s headquarters in another country is suspected of evading domestic financial supervision in the United States. At a deeper level, there is a crisis in the dominance of the dollar.
In response to the question of jurisdiction, Facebook compromised and moved the Libra headquarters back to the United States. But the crisis of confidence is much more difficult to resolve than the issue of jurisdiction can be easily resolved.
Senator Brian Schatz listed disinformation on Facebook’s platform, the concealment of data leaks to Cambridge Analytica, and the interference of political advertising during the election.
“There are so many companies in the world, why should we trust Facebook to do this? Should you solve your old problems first and then solve new ones?”
This hearing made Facebook understand that maybe Libra can issue coins, but Facebook, which is almost on the list of untrustworthy people in the eyes of lawmakers, must not issue coins. At the same time, the US government can accept giants in the financial industry, but it cannot tolerate the emergence of an oligarch that challenges the international status of the US dollar.
The fallout from the hearing has left the team devastated. Many central banks have chosen to strictly scrutinize Libra, and even directly opposed it. France and Germany have jointly stated their opposition to Libra’s introduction in Europe. Switzerland, where it was registered, announced that it would conduct a money laundering review on Libra. By September, Libra had received a joint inquiry from 26 central banks, including the Federal Reserve, in Switzerland. Growing political regulatory pressure has all but overwhelmed it.
Allies “betray” away Such scrutiny also spilled over to its allies, causing them to back off and opt out. The U.S. government even directly issued an ultimatum to these allies who joined Libra, and even made similar censorship requirements.
The first to exit was David’s old employer, PayPal. On October 4, PayPal officially announced its withdrawal from the Libra Association. Just a week later, Stripe, Visa, eBay and Mastercard all quit the Libra Association. So far, the largest financial partners have all left.
There is another reason why the impact of the collective withdrawal from the group is so bad-at this time, there is less than a week left before the first Libra Council meeting in Geneva. It can be said that the first meeting has not yet opened, and the group is about to disperse.
Diem Survives with Broken Arm In the following year, Libra did not get more support, but faced greater resistance.
Coupled with the fact that David and Zuckerberg were questioned against Facebook before participating in the hearing, they finally had to face the fact that Libra could only survive without Facebook, a giant with a bad reputation. In order to demonstrate the determination to cut off the relationship, in December 2020, Libra officially changed its name to Diem. As Libra changed its name to Diem, Libra’s wallet, Calibra, was officially renamed Novi. Meanwhile, in response to unavoidable regulation, Diem compromised and moved its headquarters from Switzerland back to the continental United States.
This name change serves two purposes. The first is to adjust the encrypted digital currency that previously pursued relatively stable purchasing power into a digital currency that seeks to maintain a stable exchange rate against the US dollar. Simply put, it is to become a compliant stable currency project that only anchors the US dollar as a currency. More deeply, this is also a huge compromise that Zuckerberg wants to reiterate to the U.S. government that he will not violate the interests of the dollar. At the same time, in order to make the dream of issuing coins come true, the renamed Diem officially separated from Facebook and operated independently.
David, who originally wanted to revolutionize the financial industry, also changed his mind at this time and said that they would subvert the payment industry and provide peer-to-peer cross-border payment services for people from all over the world.
However, the name change did nothing to change the project’s popularity, nor did it receive a positive response from any dissenting governments. The continuous downturn after the name change and the lack of progress accelerated the departure of the core members of the entire team.
In addition to the previous announcement of Diem’s co-founder Kevin Well’s resignation, 2021 is the Thanksgiving holiday. The soul of David announced that he will officially resign at the end of 2021 and hand over the entire team to Stephane, which is the final announcement at the beginning of the article to dissolve the team and sell it. The person in charge of the project. When many souls withdrew, the morale of the team plummeted, and almost no one believed that there was still any chance for this project.
Then, until this week, the entire project finally came to an end and was officially sold to Silvergate. Looking back at the past three years, the entire project has gone through countless ups and downs, full of bitter tears.
Zuckerberg’s “Sheepskin” It can be said that, regardless of Libra or Diem, the coin issuance project that Zuckerberg once talked about has come to an end. When people look back at it, they find that it is very likely that Facebook has been extremely enthusiastic about such financial “innovation” projects in recent years compared to the rapid technological innovation and research and development. It lacks substantial and solid technological progress, and is more about creating new concept.
In a speech against the Diem project, the German chancellor once called it a “wolf in sheep’s clothing”. It wants to challenge many existing orders. And the beneficiaries behind these challenges to the order may not be any country or civilian, but Facebook itself.
Senator Sherrod questioned at the Libra hearing that Facebook’s advancement of the Libra project, as always, reflects the company’s eagerness to make profits by exploiting privacy and violating moral laws, and the project itself cannot bring public welfare. “Facebook’s so-called disruptive innovation, innovation is almost gone, only the subversion of everything is left.”
Both Libra and the renamed Diem have come to an end, and Facebook has changed its name to Meta, placing the bet on the next new concept, the metaverse.
Jason Tech & Finance News 
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