Who is David Marcus?
Born in Paris & raised Geneva, the future head of Diem was raised in Switzerland, where he attended the University of Geneva. Like so many of his peers, he left school before earning a degree in order to focus on an entrepreneurial career. David Marcus proved himself early in tech, establishing GTN, an internet service provider, as his first company at 23 years of age. After achieving repeating successes in payments technology he would sell Zong to PayPal & become their VP. In April 2013, Marcus admitted that PayPal was looking into possible ways to incorporate Bitcoin in the payment company’s operations. After PayPal, Marcus ventured to Silicon Valley when Mark Zuckerberg convinced him to join as head of messaging products at Facebook. Marcus was also a former board member at Coinbase in 2018 before leading the current efforts behind Facebook’s initiative to develop its own digital stablecoin. In 2020, his project underwent a name change to Diem & Novi. Diem is preparing to launch as early as January 2021.
Quote:
“We have built very strong firewalls between Calibra and Facebook in such a way that if you’re on the Facebook side, no one can have access to that data.”
Picture source: TOBIAS HASE/DPA/CORBIS