According to David Marcus, Facebook’s head of financial services, former PayPal president and Coinbase board member, the social media giant is considering different options to integrate non-fungible token (NFT) functionality in its new crypto wallet Novi. The news came shortly after Marcus criticized the global payment systems, calling them “costly, slow, and not interconnected” in the recent blog post.
Key takeaways:
- Facebook is building a Novi cryptocurrency wallet, which will function as a stand-alone app and will also be integrated with major messaging services such as WhatsApp and Messenger apps. Novi is an interoperable digital wallet designed to work with the Diem payment system.
- Facebook’s Diem payment system is a highly scalable blockchain platform that is looking to transform peer-to-peer payments, lower transaction fees and aims to provide banking services to the currently 1.7 billion unbanked citizens.
- Diem stablecoins (formerly known as Libra), backed by cash assets and short-term government securities, will be used as a native currency. Support for additional digital currencies is in the pipeline.
- “When you have a good crypto wallet like Novi will be, you also have to think about how to help consumers support NFTs,” Marcus said in a Bloomberg interview and added that Facebook “is definitely thinking about this.”
- In the blog post, Marcus shares that he is fascinated by the idea of what it would look like if the payment system infrastructure would be invented today instead of decades ago. He concludes that if that were to happen, real contracts would be “replaced by smart contracts” and wallets would have to support NFTs by default to accommodate the digital-only world we live in today.
