Meta Shuts Down Novi Cryptocurrency Wallet

Meta Corporation, which used to be Facebook, said that the Novi cryptocurrency wallet project was ending. Users are told to get their money out before September 1 of this year.

The Novi Crypto Wallet Project is Cancelled by Meta.

Meta said that the Novi cryptocurrency wallet pilot project, which was made for payments in cryptocurrency on social networks, was over. The company told users about this decision on the project’s official website and asked them to take their digital assets back “as soon as possible.”

According to what’s on the Novi website, users won’t be able to add money to their wallets after July 21, and the WhatsApp Novi account will also stop working. And after the pilot project ends on September 1, users won’t be able to use the Novi app or see the history of their transactions on the platform.

Meta “continues to focus on making the metaverse,” which was the main reason why the project had to end. Even though the project has been completely scrapped, representatives of Meta say that all of Novi’s developments will be used in future projects, and “the technologies developed will be used to make new ways to pay in the metaverse.”

Remember that at the end of last year, Andrew Bosworth, Meta’s Vice President for AR and VR, said that the company’s cryptocurrency and blockchain projects will move at a faster rate in 2022. Soon after, the company said it was stopping work on the Diem crypto project and was looking into ways to sell assets related to it. And at the beginning of March this year, the company started making plans to make a virtual currency for the metaverse and different tokens for its apps.

Project Development

In October of last year, Meta launched the “small pilot” for Novi. The wallet came out before the Diem cryptocurrency could be used (ex-Libra).

Remember that Meta sold the Diem cryptocurrency project for almost $200 million at the beginning of February? Facebook said that it will start its own cryptocurrency called Libra in June 2019. But soon, regulators in the US and the European Union said that the Facebook cryptocurrency was not a good idea. In the EU, it was made illegal to use the Libra cryptocurrency, and it was said that laws would need to be made to control how cryptocurrencies are used. Investors also started to pull out of the Libra project. MasterCard, Visa, and PayPal left the project first.

In May 2020, Facebook changed the name of the Calibra digital wallet to Novi and had a subsidiary take over project management. Facebook wanted to show that the Libra cryptocurrency project is not a company project by changing its name. However, Facebook is one of the members of the Libra association.

The Libra cryptocurrency was changed to Diem in December 2020. In May 2021, Diem said that Silvergate Bank would be the issuer of the cryptocurrency that it would make.

How Novi Works

Users of this wallet can turn dollars or other fiat currencies into USDP stablecoins, send them to other wallets, convert them to local currencies, withdraw cash at certain locations, or transfer them to a bank account, depending on where the user lives.

The Paxos Trust Company makes the USDP stablecoin. It has a 1:1 exchange rate with the US dollar and is regulated by the New York State Department of Financial Services. Coinbase has a vault where customers’ money can be kept.

This first version of Novi Wallet is made for a small but important group of people: those who send money between Guatemala and the US. David Marcus, who is the vice president of Facebook and was the president of PayPal before that, said that remittances make up 14% of Guatemala’s GDP and that the vast majority of them come from the United States.

The World Bank thinks that in 2020, the average fee for sending money from the US would be 5.1%.

Customer Service

Novi offers help through chat in both English and Spanish. Facebook says that the crypto wallet “encrypts sensitive financial information” and has “built-in anti-fraud protection.”

One thing that makes Novi stand out is that you can cancel transactions, which isn’t usually possible with cryptocurrencies. For example, Coinbase says that once a transaction has been made, it cannot be “undone or changed.” It’s not clear if the money in question will be sent back or if the company will pay for the costs of canceling transactions.

Facebook is not the first company to think about transactions that can be canceled. Kirbo, a crypto company, has made it possible to cancel a number of tokens, including its own kiro token.

With traditional payments, merchants pay exchange fees to cover the costs of chargebacks and fraud.