Last week Marc Andreessen sat down with Joe Rogan for three hours, where the billionaire investor and founder of VC firm Andreessen Horowitz dropped an aerial bombardment of redpills on the general public - spanning everything from the US government's designs to completely control AI, to a weaponized government effort to secretly 'debank' 30 tech founders in an effort to destroy political opponents, particularly those in crypto.

Following the interview, former PayPal president, Facebook executive, and Coinbase board member (2017-2018) David Marcus revealed on Friday how political pressure and red tape led to the demise of Facebook's cryptocurrency project, Libra (later rebranded as Diem).

Libra was an advanced blockchain paired with a stablecoin aimed at solving global payment inefficiencies at scale. Despite extensive efforts to address regulatory concerns, including financial crime prevention, reserve management, and consumer protections, the project was ultimately derailed—not by legal obstacles but by political opposition.

"Prior to announcing the project, we spent months briefing key regulators in DC and abroad. We then announced the project in June 2019 alongside 28 companies. Two weeks later, I was called to testify in front of both the Senate Banking Committee and the House Financial Services Committee, which was the starting point of two years of nonstop work and changes to appease lawmakers and regulators," Marcus writes on X.

According to Marcus, the turning point came in 2021 after having "addressed every last possible regulatory concern across financial crime, money laundering, consumer protection, reserve management, buffers, and so much more" in advance of launch. 

Federal Reserve Chair Jay Powell appeared ready to greenlight a limited pilot of the project, but Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen allegedly intervened. In a private meeting, Yellen reportedly warned Powell that supporting Libra would be “political suicide,” a move that Marcus describes as the definitive blow. Shortly thereafter, Federal Reserve representatives discouraged participating banks from moving forward, effectively intimidating the financial institutions into withdrawing their support. For Marcus, this marked not just the end of Libra but also a disheartening realization about the political dynamics within the U.S. financial system.

"Shortly thereafter, the Fed organized calls with all the participating banks, and the Fed’s general counsel read a prepared statement to each of them, saying: “We can’t stop you from moving forward and launching, but we are not comfortable with you doing so.” And just like that, it was over." -David Marcus

Marcus emphasized that there was "no legal or regulatory angle left for the government or regulators to kill the project. It was 100% a political kill—one that was executed through intimidation of captive banking institutions."

[ZH: Hey PayPal, can we get our account back now?]

Gemini COO Marshall Beard replied to Marcus' post, saying "We were closely aligned with his team during this and saw first hand went they went through."

After Andreessen then brought up the 'critical question' of "Who has been making these decisions? Management? The government? Or both," Dennis Porter, CEO and Co-Founder of the Satoshi Act Fund, a US-based nonprofit which advocates for Bitcoin adoption, replied "the banks themselves. But the reason they do it is totally out of their control."

Porter and team wrote a paper on the problem, highlighting how the feds pressure banks to classify certain industries as "risky," and then threaten to investigate.

The federal regulators (OCC, FDIC, and the Federal Reserve) apply soft-power pressure to banks. Federal regulators started by classifying certain industries (such as crypto) as risky and by default any crypto account holders as a risk to any bank that banked them. If a bank is discovered to be banking “risky” businesses that gave Federal regulators the authority to dig deeper and audit the bank to see if anything else they are doing is “risky”. Banks don’t like to be audited. It’s expensive and time consuming. So banks “voluntarily” began to debank their “risky” customer. Also, a “risky” bank may have its FDIC payments (premiums) increase due to its “risky behavior” of banking risky industries. So the banks once again prefer to debank these customers voluntarily to avoid increased costs. -Dennis Porter

Gemini co-founder Tyler Winklevoss chimed in, saying "This is how debanking works."

Meanwhile, Andreessen highlighted that Melania and Barron Trump were debanked - to which the recently redpilled Bill Ackman replied "Which bank?"

Turns out at least Donald Trump was debanked by Bank United, Signature Bank, and Professional Bank: 

Others reflected on Marcus' account: