Meta announced the closure of Novi, its cryptocurrency wallet
As of September 1, Novi, the cryptocurrency wallet developed by Meta, will be definitively closed.
The application, framed in a pilot program, is now urging its users to withdraw their funds, since after the closure it will not be possible to do so.
Meta cryptocurrency wallet was discontinued
“The Novi pilot will end soon”is the first thing that can be read now in the website of the project. “Novi will no longer be available from September 1. Before it becomes unavailable, you can easily withdraw the remaining balance and download your Novi information”it also points to the message that the site displays in its main header.
In other words, the broadcast announcement states that Novi users will not be able to access their accounts after September 1st. This implies that once that date has been reached, its users will not be able to recover the money or other information from their accounts, such as their transaction history, for example.
This cryptocurrency exchange platform was released in october last year, under a pilot plan limited to the United States and Guatemala. Its deployment during this stage was supported by Coinbase, which assumed the role of “custody partner”, safeguarding these assets. Meta, for its part, was responsible for the development and maintenance of the platform itself.
Novi emerged with the purpose of generating a secure instance for the exchange of cryptocurrencies. Initially, the project considered support for diem, the cryptocurrency project developed by Meta, which at its launch in 2019 was initially released under the name of Libra. However, this integration never came, when the initiative was discontinued last February, in the midst of an adverse context for the project, which concentrated strong criticism from regulators and politicians.
Meta’s foray into the world of cryptocurrencies can be seen as an uphill climb. In the beginning, they had the support of major financial firms, such as Visa, Mastercard, eBay and PayPal, among others. However, as time progressed and the controversies caused by the project, a large part of these partners abandoned the initiative.
The termination of this project can be attributed to similar reasons to those who motivated the closure of the Diem project. At that time, despite not completely disassociating itself from the use of cryptocurrencies, the company indicated that the market acceptance of its digital payment products is subject to a “significant uncertainty”raising at that time serious doubts about the continuity of the products offered under this category.
The withdrawal of Meta from this type of cryptographic projects can be considered as an indicator of the critical moment that these digital assets are going through. The drop in the global market capitalization of cryptocurrencies has narrowed below $1 trillion. The trend continues to be downward, with the latent possibility of facing a major collapse, according to analysts, even though the falls registered so far already exceed historical records.
