Sending money to family in another country still costs more than it should, and it can take days to arrive. A social app, by contrast, delivers a message to the same person in under a second. So when a firm whose apps reach billions of people says it wants to move money the way it moves chat, the idea sounds obvious to users and draws pushback from regulators.
That pushback has a reason. Money that moves across borders inside one firm's apps raises hard questions about who holds the cash behind it, who checks it for money laundering, and who sees each payment.
Crypto had a ready answer in the stablecoin, a token that holds a steady price because cash and short-term government debt are held in reserve behind it. A group of firms could run the network together, so no one firm would own it, and a wallet inside a chat app could send the coin anywhere in seconds.
Meta Platforms, which owns Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram, tried just that in 2019 and gave up three years later. Tokenized Meta now trades on BloFin as METAX on the METAX/USDT Spot market, a token with real Meta shares held behind it. The METAUSDT Perpetual tracks the same stock as a contract with no shares behind it.
What was Facebook's Libra?
Facebook's Libra was a global stablecoin that Facebook announced on June 18, 2019, with a wallet from Calibra, a Facebook-owned firm, planned for Messenger, WhatsApp and a standalone app (source: Meta Newsroom). Renamed Diem in December 2020, it never reached the public, and its backers sold the project's code on January 31, 2022 (source: Diem).
Libra was meant to be backed by a basket of bank deposits and short-term government bonds in several currencies, held in a pool called the Libra Reserve (source: Libra white paper). The interest on that pool would pay the cost of running the network, and people who held Libra would earn nothing from it (source: Libra white paper; Yale Journal on Regulation). If you have used a dollar stablecoin such as USDT, the model will feel familiar. The one big change is that Libra's price would have tracked a mix of currencies, with the dollar as just one part.
Facebook planned Libra as a joint project. The coin was to be issued by the Libra Association, a Swiss-based group meant to manage the network's technical and financial operations (source: Yale Journal on Regulation). Its 28 original partners included PayPal, Visa and Mastercard (source: CBS News). Calibra would build a digital wallet for Libra (source: Meta Newsroom).
That shared structure was the sales pitch, and it was also where the trouble started. Facebook was the member with the users, the app and the wallet, so when lawmakers wanted answers, it was Facebook's boss they called to testify.
Why regulators stopped Libra
Regulators stopped Libra by withholding approval: officials in the US and Europe pushed back on a private coin that billions of people could use, and Facebook had pledged to wait for every US regulator's yes. By the time Mark Zuckerberg faced Congress in October 2019, seven of the 28 founding partners had already quit (source: CBS News).
The pressure built within months of the announcement. Lawmakers in Washington worried that the coin could sidestep regulators. Payment firms that had signed up as partners started to leave before the coin even existed (source: CBS News).
At that hearing, Zuckerberg's written remarks said Facebook would stay out of any Libra launch, anywhere, unless all US regulators said yes. The partners who had left included PayPal, Visa and Mastercard (source: CBS News). That is a quarter of the first group gone in four months. The chair of the House Financial Services Committee, Maxine Waters, said the coin would raise many concerns (source: CBS News).
The project kept changing to answer its critics. Calibra became Novi in May 2020, and Libra became Diem in December 2020 (source: Meta Newsroom). Diem also added safeguards such as a ban on anonymous payments, which it said can help people dodge sanctions and launder money (source: Diem). None of it won the green light Zuckerberg had promised to wait for.
Diem's CEO, Stuart Levey, later said a senior US regulator had called it the best-designed stablecoin project the government had seen. He also wrote that "it nevertheless became clear from our dialogue with federal regulators that the project could not move ahead" (source: Diem). The praise was for the design, and the answer was still no.
Diem's sale to Silvergate
The Diem group sold its blockchain code and tools to Silvergate, a US bank that worked with many crypto firms, on January 31, 2022. Silvergate paid $50 million in cash and 1,221,217 of its own shares, a package worth $182 million at that day's closing price (source: Silvergate 8-K).
Cash was the smaller part of the deal, about 27.5% of the total: the other $132 million was paid in stock, which implies a Silvergate share price of about $108 on the day. Paying mostly in shares meant Diem's backers were tied to Silvergate's future, since their payment rose and fell with its stock.
Silvergate bought the rights to the project's code and ideas, plus the tools for running the network, and said it still planned to launch a stablecoin of its own in 2022. In January 2023 Silvergate said it would take a $196 million charge for the fourth quarter of 2022 on the technology it had bought from Diem. A launch of its own blockchain payment product was "no longer imminent", it said (source: The Block).
For Meta, the sale ended a project that had run 958 days from its announcement, about two years and seven months. The engineers who built it went their own ways, and several of them took its code and ideas into new firms.
The Novi wallet and Meta's NFT experiment
Meta tried two smaller crypto products after Libra stalled. Its Novi wallet ran a pilot from October 2021 that let people in the US and Guatemala send money using the Paxos Dollar, a stablecoin from Paxos, with Coinbase holding the funds (source: Banking Dive). Meta also let users show off non-fungible tokens (NFTs), one-of-a-kind tokens often tied to digital art.
The pilot ran without Diem, the coin that was supposed to be its centerpiece. Meta closed it on September 1, 2022, and users could no longer add money from July 21 (source: Banking Dive). From first day to last, the Novi pilot lasted under a year.
The NFT feature, which Meta called digital collectibles, started on May 10, 2022 as a test for some US creators on Instagram. It worked with Ethereum and Polygon at first, then Flow and Solana. By September 29, 2022 anyone in the US could link a wallet and share NFTs on Facebook and Instagram. On November 2, 2022 Meta said a small group of US creators would soon be able to make and sell them, starting on Polygon (source: Meta Newsroom on digital collectibles).
Meta closed that feature too. A note dated March 31, 2023 says the NFT feature is gone from both Instagram and Facebook, 325 days after the first test (source: Meta Newsroom on digital collectibles). Since then Meta has put its money into data centers and AI models, and Meta's spending on AI tracks how much.
What Libra left behind: Move, Aptos and Sui
The biggest thing Libra left behind is Move, the coding language Facebook engineers wrote for it. Two live blockchains, Aptos and Sui, were started by former Meta crypto staff and run their own versions of Move. Sam Blackshear, credited with creating Move, was a principal engineer at Novi and became chief technology officer of Sui's developer, Mysten Labs (source: The Block on Mysten Labs).
Move was built for money from the start. It treats a token as something that can pass from one owner to the next but can be neither copied nor quietly lost, and a program that breaks that rule is rejected before it can run. You can read how it handles tokens in the academy's guide to the Move language, which also separates the original Diem version from the versions in use today.
Investors paid a lot for that work once Diem closed. A team of former Meta employees raised $200 million in March 2022 for Aptos, a chain built on the open-source Diem code that uses Move, in a round led by Andreessen Horowitz (source: Forklog).
All five of Mysten's founders worked on Meta's crypto projects, and in September 2022 the firm raised $300 million at a value of more than $2 billion (source: The Block on Mysten Labs). Both raises came within eight months of Diem's sale. The two chains share a language and a past but store tokens in different ways, and Sui versus Aptos compares the two.
Meta's USDC payouts to creators
Meta returned to stablecoins in April 2026, as a payer and not as an issuer. Some creators in Colombia and the Philippines can take their earnings in USDC, Circle's dollar stablecoin, on Solana or Polygon, with Stripe running the payments (source: Decrypt on the USDC payouts).
A Meta spokesperson said the company is "not issuing a Meta stablecoin" and is using Circle's coin instead. The same report says Meta is looking at how stablecoins could join its other ways of paying people (source: Decrypt on the USDC payouts).
That is a much smaller bet than Libra.
Question | Libra (2019 plan) | USDC payouts (2026) |
|---|---|---|
Who issues the coin | The Libra Association, with Facebook as one member | Circle |
What backs it | A basket of deposits and bonds in several currencies | Dollar reserves held for USDC |
Which network | Libra's own blockchain | Solana or Polygon |
Meta's role | Founder, wallet maker and network member | A company paying creators |
Who can use it | Planned for Messenger and WhatsApp users | Some creators in two countries |
Taken together, Meta now carries far less risk than it would have with Libra. Circle holds the cash and answers for each USDC token, so Meta is one of many firms paying people in a coin someone else makes. Holding crypto is a different choice from paying in it, and in 2025 Meta's shareholders voted down a proposal to assess holding Bitcoin.
Could Meta issue a stablecoin under US law?
If Meta wanted its own stablecoin again, US law now sets a high bar. The GENIUS Act, signed on July 18, 2025, bars a public company outside finance from issuing a payment stablecoin unless all members of a federal committee vote that it is safe. The firm must also agree to strict limits on payment data (source: Public Law 119-27).
That committee got a set of working procedures on September 30, 2026. The Treasury wrote them for the Stablecoin Certification Review Committee, made up of the Treasury Secretary as chair, the head of the Federal Reserve and the head of the FDIC. The rule sets out how the panel checks state stablecoin rules, and the public can comment on it until November 30, 2026 (source: Federal Register).
For Meta, the vote would turn on three tests. The coin must pose no serious risk to US banks or the wider financial system. Meta and the firms it owns must also follow the law's ban on tying, which stops an issuer from making its service depend on a customer buying another paid product from it. The third test is about data, and it hits Meta's business hardest.
Unless a user agrees, the law says personal data taken from stablecoin payments may not be "used to target, personalize, or rank advertising or other content", sold, or shared outside the company (source: Public Law 119-27). Ads earned Meta $63.1 billion of its $64.6 billion in revenue in the July-to-September 2026 quarter, or 97.6% (source: Meta Q3 2026 results). A Meta coin would therefore come with a wall between payment data and Meta's ad business, which pays for almost everything else.
The rest of the GENIUS Act, from reserve rules to the ban on paying interest, applies to every licensed issuer, and it comes into force on January 18, 2027 (source: OCC final rule, Federal Register, October 23, 2026). Paying creators in USDC sidesteps the whole question, because Circle is the issuer and Meta is only a customer.
Reserve-backed tokens, then and now
Libra and METAX rest on the same promise: a token is worth what sits in reserve behind it. Libra's pool was meant to hold deposits and short-term bonds, while each METAX token is backed by Meta shares held by its issuer. In both cases the holder has to trust that the pool exists and matches the tokens in the market.
The big gap is that you can check METAX now. Its issuer posts a live tally of how many Meta shares it keeps and how many tokens are out, so anyone can compare the two. Tokenized Meta is a certificate the issuer backs with real shares, and the guide to check METAX's reserves shows where the issuer publishes both numbers.
Libra never reached that test, because the coin was never issued. A token that tracks a listed firm also moves for its own reasons: METAX rises and falls with Meta's share price, so news about Meta's payment plans reaches it just as it reaches the stock. You can watch METAX move on the METAX/USDT Spot page, and a leveraged long or short on Meta sits on the METAUSDT Perpetual page.
What to watch next for Meta and stablecoins
The next fixed dates come from regulators. Comments on the committee's new rules close on November 30, 2026 (source: Federal Register). The GENIUS Act and the Comptroller of the Currency's final rule both take effect on January 18, 2027 (source: OCC final rule, Federal Register, October 23, 2026). The law also gave the committee until July 18, 2026 to publish a rule explaining how the limit on firms outside finance works (source: Public Law 119-27), and that rule is still to come.
Meta's own reports are the other thing to read. Its results for July to September, posted after New York trading ended on Wednesday, October 21, 2026, made no mention of stablecoins or USDC (source: Meta Q3 2026 results). Each later quarterly report is the next place where a change to its payment plans could show up.
None of these dates needs a Meta coin to matter. Each one shapes how far a firm built on ads can go in payments, and that question has followed Meta since the day Libra was first shown.
Looking to trade Meta as its stablecoin story unfolds? To get started, you'll need to first create a BloFin account, fund your account with cryptocurrency, and go to the METAX/USDT Spot trading page or the METAUSDT Perpetual trading page.
Frequently asked questions
Is the LIBRA memecoin linked to Facebook's Libra?
The LIBRA token that crashed in February 2025 is a separate Solana memecoin with only the name in common. Argentina's president, Javier Milei, promoted it in a since-deleted post, and it reached a market value of about $4.5 billion before falling nearly 90% within hours (source: Decrypt on the LIBRA memecoin).
What did Facebook promise about Libra wallet data?
Facebook said in 2019 that Calibra would keep wallet data apart from Facebook. Its announcement stated that "Calibra will not share account information or financial data with Facebook or any third party without customer consent". It added that the data would stay out of ad targeting, with limited exceptions for safety and the law (source: Meta Newsroom).
Which wallets can receive Meta's USDC payouts?
Creators in the pilot link their own crypto wallet to receive USDC on Solana or Polygon. Decrypt names MetaMask, Phantom and Binance's wallet among the supported options. Meta said it tries to offer creators the most relevant ways to get paid (source: Decrypt on the USDC payouts).
Does the GENIUS Act's tech-firm limit cover WhatsApp and Instagram?
The unanimous-vote rule covers the parent company and the firms it wholly or mostly owns, so a coin launched through WhatsApp, Instagram or another Meta business would face the same tests on risk, tying and payment data. The law counts a company as public when it must file regular reports with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (source: Public Law 119-27), and Meta files them (source: Meta Q3 2026 results).
What happened to NFTs people shared on Instagram?
They stayed on people's profiles as normal posts. When Meta ended the feature, it said NFTs already shared "will remain as posts, but no blockchain info will be displayed" (source: Meta Newsroom on digital collectibles). Posting or sharing an NFT had never carried a fee on Instagram.
Researched and written by the BloFin Academy editorial team with AI-assisted drafting. All facts independently verified. Primary sources include Public Law 119-27 (the GENIUS Act), the Libra white paper, the Treasury's Federal Register rule of September 30, 2026, the Comptroller of the Currency's final rule of October 23, 2026, Meta's results release for the third quarter of 2026, Meta Newsroom, Silvergate's SEC filing on the Diem sale and the Diem statement on the asset sale, with reporting from CBS News, the Yale Journal on Regulation, The Block, Decrypt, Banking Dive and Forklog, current as of October 25, 2026.
Nothing in this article constitutes financial advice, and nothing in it is a recommendation to buy, sell or hold Meta in any form. News about Meta's payments or stablecoin plans can move its share price, and METAX moves with it, while a leveraged METAUSDT Perpetual position can be liquidated by a sharp move. Libra's history shows that regulators can stop a crypto project after years of work, and any future Meta product could meet the same fate. Past performance does not indicate future results. Do your own research and consider your risk tolerance before you trade on BloFin.