After some hesitation, Facebook is ready to go. Two years after the fanfare announcement of the creation of a digital currency 100% made in Facebook, the Silicon Valley giant is concretizing the launch of a new, much less ambitious digital transaction system.

On Wednesday August 18, David Marcus, in a Medium post, CEO of Facebook Financial, the group's subsidiary that develops online payments, announced that his Novi digital wallet was "ready to enter the market", without Might as well set a schedule. Novi presents itself as a "fast and affordable" alternative to current payment systems, described by David Marcus as "expensive" and "slow". It will be a solution for the “1.7 billion people who are not registered in a bank”, including “62 million Americans”. Concretely, Novi users, who will not necessarily need to have a Facebook account, will be able to carry out their transactions instantly and worldwide by converting their local currency into “diem”. This new cryptocurrency is a “stablecoin”, that is to say a stable digital currency, its price being indexed to the dollar.

Announced with great fanfare in June 2019, this project was to see the light of day in the first quarter of 2020. At the time, the wallet was called "Calibra" while the "stablecoin" was called "libra". The non-profit association that carried the project was then based in Switzerland and not in the United States, as is the case today. This first version presented much more ambitious objectives. The course of the libra was to be indexed not to one, but to a portfolio of five currencies, including the dollar. Central banks and regulators, particularly in Europe, immediately stepped up to try to curb Facebook, for fear that this digital currency would quickly impose itself to the detriment of the currencies of the most fragile States, making the situation of these States even more difficult. Concretely, Novi users, who will not necessarily need to have a Facebook account, will be able to carry out their transactions instantly and worldwide by converting their local currency into “diem”.