Executives at the embattled social media giant Facebook may be cooking up their own cryptocurrency, according to a post from a company Vice President.
Facebook Vice President of Messaging Products David Marcus announced this week that he was leaving the Facebook Messenger team to establish a small project team that will focus on blockchain technology, the backbone structure of cryptocurrencies.
“After nearly four unbelievably rewarding years leading Messenger, I have decided it was time for me to take on a new challenge,” Marcus wrote on May 8. “I’m setting up a small group to explore how to best leverage Blockchain across Facebook, starting from scratch.” Blockchain is the underlying technology behind cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin.
In January, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that he was making a personal commitment to learning more about blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies. However, just a few weeks later, Facebook announced that they would be banning cryptocurrency advertisements from the platform as a part of an alleged effort to prevent the spread of potentially illegitimate blockchain startups.
Some analysts believe that decentralized nature of blockchain technology could allow Facebook to rebuild trust with their users. In March, Facebook was forced to take out several full-page advertisements in newspapers in both America in the UK after a data scandal that involved the leaking of millions of user’s personal data.
In January 2017, Breitbart News reported on the emergence of blockchain technology, focusing on the rise of the Ethereum project.
“The decentralized nature of the Ethereum blockchain would allow for social networks that are truly resistant to censorship,” the report read. “Unlike Facebook or Twitter, a social network operating on Ethereum wouldn’t be accessed via centralized servers. Such a network would exist as a peer-to-peer network that lives on computers throughout the world. Because such a network would have no centralized body, censorship would be extremely difficult.”
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