NYT: Facebook Is Launching a Cryptocurrency

A recent article in the New York Times discusses Facebook and Telegram’s plans to introduce their own cryptocurrencies in the coming future.

The article in the Times titled “Facebook and Telegram Are Hoping to Succeed Where Bitcoin Failed,” discusses how social media giant Facebook and messaging service Telegram have plans for a cryptocurrency system of their own. Breitbart News reported on Facebook’s own cryptocurrency plans in December of 2018.

In a post to his Facebook page in January of 2018, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg stated that every year he takes on a new personal challenge and so far has, “visited every US state, run 365 miles, built an AI for my home, read 25 books, and learned Mandarin.” Now this year, the billionaire CEO has turned his sights towards cryptocurrencies in 2018. Zuckerberg first began discussing the work that Facebook needs to do saying, “The world feels anxious and divided, and Facebook has a lot of work to do — whether it’s protecting our community from abuse and hate, defending against interference by nation states, or making sure that time spent on Facebook is time well spent.”

Now it seems that apps such as Telegram and Facebook want to get in on the cryptocurrency business. The New York Times writes:

The internet outfits, including Facebook, Telegram and Signal, are planning to roll out new cryptocurrencies over the next year that are meant to allow users to send money to contacts on their messaging systems, like a Venmo or PayPal that can move across international borders.

The most anticipated but secretive project is underway at Facebook. The company is working on a coin that users of WhatsApp, which Facebook owns, could send to friends and family instantly, said five people briefed on the effort who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of confidentiality agreements.

The Facebook project is far enough along that the social networking giant has held conversations with cryptocurrency exchanges about selling the Facebook coin to consumers, said four people briefed on the negotiations.

The Times notes that payment apps such as Venmo in the U.S. have become popular while in China the WeChat system is used for many payments, meaning that Facebook’s own crypto coin could be successful if run well:

Telegram, which has an estimated 300 million users worldwide, is also working on a digital coin. Signal, an encrypted messaging service that is popular among technologists and privacy advocates, has its own coin in the works. And so do the biggest messaging applications in Korea and Japan, Kakao and Line.

The messaging companies have a reach that dwarfs the backers of earlier cryptocurrencies. Facebook and Telegram can make the digital wallets used for cryptocurrencies available, in an instant, to hundreds of millions of users.

All of the new projects are going after a market that has already proved popular with consumers. Venmo has taken off in the United States by making it easier to send payments by phone. And in China, many consumers use the payment system that operates inside the hugely popular WeChat messaging system.

The Times further notes that Facebook seems to be aiming their coin towards those that wish to make quick easy payments, not speculators wishing to buy the coin at a low value and sell it once the value increases:

 

Facebook is looking at several ways to use the blockchain, the technology introduced by Bitcoin that makes it possible to keep shared records of financial transactions on several computers, rather than relying on one big central player like PayPal or Visa.

The five people who have been briefed on the Facebook team’s work said the company’s most immediate product is likely to be a coin that would be pegged to the value of traditional currencies, as Bloomberg first reported.

A digital token with a stable value would not be attractive to speculators — the main audience for cryptocurrencies so far — but it would allow consumers to hold it and pay for things without worrying about the value of the coin rising and falling.

Read the full article in the New York Times here.