According to its official announcement on the 1st of December, the once called Libra coin is changing its name to Diem. The domain of their original name libra.org now redirects to diem.com.
The Libra coin, which came out last year, was intended to launch in 2020 but got into many roadblocks from regulators and the news of it was short-lived. Now with its new rebranding, according to their website, they are launching a stable coin pegged to the dollar in January 2021 as a starting point, though their plan is issuing 4 types of currency stablecoins.
Their vision on the section Vision of their website is the following:
The Diem payment system will support single-currency stablecoins (e.g., ?USD, ?EUR, and ?GBP) and a multi-currency coin (?XDM).
Facebook is still tied into the project, also after the rebranding. And speaking of Facebook, as a side-note Mark Zuckerberg just unloaded a bit of his shares (zoom in by clicking pic):
Why is this important for the crypto community:
Libra as a project was put down or opposed by regulation. The fact that now they are rebranding and launching must mean that there is going to be more clarity and maybe new regulations.
It is important to note that Christine Lagarde (European Central Bank President) also said a couple of weeks ago, that her "hunch" is that a digital Euro is going to be adopted, because it is faster, cheaper, secure ect (as if banks where not against digital currencies until a while ago, now they are our friends). By mid January 2021 the ECB is concluding a public consultation on whether there is a need of issuing a digital Euro. (source here).
My thoughts on it:
In my opinion, regulations are going to come soon. The projects that are going to profit most from them are going to be those, which do not offer anonymity, or total decentralization. It is going to be those projects that have a company or institution behind them, and have been working with banks and regulators. And if the price is those assets is going to shoot up (which it probably will), they will make sure that governments know, who holds how much (KYC framework), in order for it to be taxed. I can think of a couple of assets which fall into this category, and which coincidentally had a leap of price increase last 2 weeks.
