WhatsApp, the messaging app that has put SMS in the cellar, takes an important step towards the adoption of cryptocurrencies by giving American users the possibility to send and receive money through the Novi wallet, developed by Facebook-Meta. In this way, subscribers will be able to make and receive payments directly from the chat rooms, at no additional cost. As was already the case for the other Telegram messaging app, which allowed on some coins such as Dash or Nav for example, the use of applications for the exchange of value.
At the moment the program involves a limited number of accounts present within the US territory, but it is likely that the range of action will be extended at least to India and Brazil, where the testing phase has just begun. Novi wallet is most likely an application that is part of the Libra digital currency project, which Facebook had already announced in 2019, but which then slowed down for regulatory reasons.
Just yesterday, the member of the board of the ECB, Fabio Panetta – who is also the head of the digital Euro project officially launched last July – underlined how 80 countries in the world are moving towards the creation of digital currencies while it is getting stronger the growth of cryptocurrencies, stablecoins and payment transactions by the big tech giants. Novi was born from the Libra digital currency project, which Facebook had announced with the aim of revolutionizing the global economy.
For this reason, Panetta points out, the European Union can contrast a “sovereign currency that can be used by anyone, families, business dealers” with the same services as banknotes that would not disappear. A currency without “market, credit and liquidity” risks and which would also ensure greater protection of privacy than that of private companies that increasingly earn more not from transaction fees but from user data, posing risks to the protection “of proven aspects of our life or political or sexual tendencies or the state of health “interfering” with the rules of functioning of a modern liberal democracy “.
In recent days, the head of the cryptocurrency division David Marcus had resigned. The announcement was made via Twitter by Marcus himself, who confirms his farewell to Facebook by the end of the year. Marcus joined Meta, which was then called Facebook, in August 2014, after two years as president of PayPal. After a start at the head of the Messenger division, in 2018 he joined the Facebook unit dedicated to funded projects. We are talking about the same division that then announced the launch of Libra and the digital wallet Calibra, in June 2019. The two projects, which should have seen the light in 2020.
All transactions on WhatsApp will be made using the Pax Dollar (USDP) cryptocurrency, a stablecoin pegged to the US dollar. The guarantee on the safekeeping of the sums is entrusted to Coinbase, a leading digital asset exchange platform based in San Francisco, founded in 2012 by Brian Armstrong and Fred Ehrsam.
