Facebook, Inc. (NASDAQ:FB) has been eyeing the field of blockchain technology for some time. A few days ago, the social networking giant appointed Evan Cheng as the new engineering director to lead its blockchain technology team.
Facebook venturing aggressively in blockchain sector
Cheng earlier worked as the director of engineering, programming languages, and runtimes at Facebook. This new development suggests that Facebook is now gearing up aggressively to promote itself in the blockchain and cryptocurrency market. Apart from Cheng, Facebook also promoted Instagram’s former vice president, Kevin Weil as its blockchain division’s vice president of product.
In May 2018, David Marcus, the head of the Messenger platform of Facebook was given the task of leading the company’s team to explore blockchain technology. Incidentally, Marcus is one of the directors at Coinbase and his expertise is expected to help Facebook make rapid development in blockchain sector. Marcus stated that the social networking giant has set up a team for exploring the benefits of blockchain-based applications across its platform.
Cheng consulting different blockchain-based projects
According to one of the sources, these appointments indicate that Facebook is not just exploring blockchain as a project but is most probably quite serious about it. Cheng has already started consulting different projects related to the blockchain. Recently he consulted Zilliqa, a blockchain platform based in Singapore and ChainLink, a middleware provider focused on security.
At the start of the year when the tech giant banned initial coin offerings (ICO) and ads related to virtual currency on its platform, trade analysts believed that Facebook was completely against the blockchain technology. However, the social networking platform relaxed the ban to a small extent later on and re-allowed the projects related to digital currency to run their ads.
Until now Facebook has not revealed how it intends to use the blockchain solutions for developing its platform. However, the way it is pursuing the technology, especially after facing the data crisis issue, Facebook will most probably use blockchain applications to improve its services and safeguard the data on its platform.
Facebook will face a tough competition from Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) as its Taiwanese subsidiary has already started its work on blockchain development.