The chief executive overseeing Facebook’s efforts to get into cryptocurrency and international money transfer initiatives resigned on Tuesday, further challenging the company's efforts to gain a foothold into the fast-growing realm of digital currencies and blockchain technology.

David Marcus’s high-profile departure comes just months after the company began hitting walls in Washington when it relaunched its initiative to use cryptocurrency to allow its users to make payments and send money to each other without transaction fees. The project has faced delays and name changes since it was first announced in 2019, coming under scrutiny from regulators and users, many of whom are already concerned about the social media giant’s power.

In tweets announcing his departure, Marcus wrote, "My entrepreneurial DNA has been nudging me for too many mornings in a row to continue ignoring it." Marcus said, the job will be taken over by Stephane Kasriel, a vice president in Facebook's fintech and crypto division. A Facebook spokesman did not respond to a request for comment.

Cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology could also play an important role in Facebook's efforts to rebrand under its new corporate nam, Meta and move beyond social media to create its own "metaverse" — a vague term for a future in which people use augmented and virtual reality technology to spend more time in shared digital spaces. Blockchain technology, which allows for transaction and ownership records without the need for a centralised database or authority such as a bank or government, is seen as the backbone for a metaverse where people meet, work, and conduct commerce, according to cryptocurrency investors. Prices for digital art and real estate linked to blockchains have surged in the last year.

As the company has been enmeshed in controversies in recent years, particularly recent revelations from an internal whistleblower revealing the scale of societal harm the digital giant knew it caused, Facebook has seen a slew of CEO departures. Last month, the company's policy director for counterterrorism and dangerous organisations, who played a key role in managing the consequences from the Jan. 6 insurgency, also left last month. The role that the company played in fueling that event was reported in the Washington Post and other media outlets.

Marcus was hired by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg in 2014 from PayPal to help lead the Facebook’s Messenger app. In 2018, he was named head of the company's cryptocurrency efforts, and a year later, Libra, the original name of the project to use cryptocurrency to facilitate international money transfers, was disclosed. Politicians complained, and the company agreed to delay the launch of Libra until it received regulatory approval in the United States.  Other corporations that had originally signed on to assist the project, including as eBay, PayPal, and Visa, have pulled their support.

Facebook renamed the project Diem, and announced its own payments and cryptocurrencies app called Novi. The new iteration of Facebook’s cryptocurrency would be a stablecoin — a kind of cryptocurrency that has its value pinned to a real-world currency or basket of assets like U.S. Treasury bonds. Facebook executives have been lobbying the White House on the new plan, but concerns persist and the project garnered renewed pushback in Washington, The Post reported in September. Treasury Department officials are concerned a cryptocurrency dominated by Facebook could be a danger to the economy if it became popular and then crashed, according to people familiar with the discussions.

Facebook’s efforts in the space have been hailed by some cryptocurrency boosters as another sign that digital currencies are the future. But some blockchain enthusiasts and crypto investors are concerned about a powerful corporation ultimately controlled by one person pushing into a space that was originally meant to help free people from having to rely on big companies and governments to do business and make payments.