Facebook Vice President David Marcus is the face of the company's Libra digital currency, but the original driving force was a 26-year-old named Morgan Beller.

On February 12, 2018, Silicon Valley investor and cryptocurrency technologist Howard Wu was invited to Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park to discuss the implications, opportunities and risks of introducing more than 2 billion online users to blockchain technology.

The invitation didn't come from Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, or Vice President and former PayPal executive David Marcus, the current leader of Facebook's Libra cryptocurrency proposal and Calibra wallet.

Instead, he met with Morgan Beller, a rather new employee in Facebook's corporate development unit who treated him to a cup of joe from the Philz Coffee on the company's campus.

Beller's questions were fascinating, if not far-fetched.

"'If you had a platform of over 2 billion users, how would you go about trying to integrate blockchain technology into the platform?'" Wu recalls Beller asking. By the time their coffee meeting -- one of many -- was over, Wu left Facebook feeling an equal combination of excitement and uncertainty.

"It wasn't VPs at a table discussing the forward direction of a project. It was very casual, but I thought it was an exciting prospect," Wu told CNBC. "This ended up metamorphosing into what Libra and Calibra became."

Since announcing its Libra digital currency and Calibra digital wallet in June, Marcus has been the public the face of the two projects, announcing the details in blog posts, doing press interviews and testifying before skeptical lawmakers in Congress.

But in the blockchain community, Beller is known as the original driving force behind Facebook's push into cryptocurrency. On LinkedIn, Beller lists herself as head of strategy for Calibra as well as co-creator of Libra -- one of three Facebook employees to do so, alongside Marcus and Vice President Kevin Weil.

"Morgan was really the first one, at least to my understanding," Wu said. "She's done a fantastic job of getting other people in the cryptocurrency communities to get on board with Libra. She has a very outsize value-add from that alone."