As a part of the major overhaul of its products and services, Facebook has formed a new Blockchain group for working on studying and implementing the technology at their end.
The social media mogul – Facebook is pushing forward its plans with the blockchain development as the company has now announced a new Blockchain group which will be headed Davis Marcus who is the former head of Messenger at Facebook as well as a board member at the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange ‘Coinbase’.
On Tuesday, in a post on his Facebook page, Marcus said:
After nearly four unbelievably rewarding years leading Messenger, I have decided it was time for me to take on a new challenge. I’m setting up a small group to explore how to best leverage Blockchain across Facebook, starting from scratch.
As reported by Recode, Facebook announced a major overhaul in its 15-year history while promoting long-time Facebook executives to tackle new responsibilities like working and exploring the blockchain technology and its solutions, and appointing heads for the existing services like WhatsApp and Messenger.
The publication notes that such a decision from Facebook arrived after its recent exposure to the Cambridge Analytica Scandal wherein data of millions of users was compromised to influence political elections of U.S President Donald Trump. CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently classified the company’s operations into three different categories: a “family of apps” group, “central product services” and “new platforms and infra.”
It is however still not clear as to how Facebook plans to implement and deploy the blockchain technology or its related solutions to its platform. One of the most obvious applications could be the encrypted data storage. It is said that the new blockchain group formed under the leadership of David Marcus will comprise less than a dozen employees including James Everingham, vice president of engineering at Instagram, and Kevin Weil, Instagram’s vice president of product.
Earlier this year, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg had made his intentions clear about studying the decentralized blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies as the company has been fighting against the major menace and challenge of fake news being propagated through the Facebook platform. At that time, Zuckerberg said:
My personal challenge for 2018 is to focus on fixing these important issues. We won’t prevent all mistakes or abuse, but we currently make too many errors enforcing our policies and preventing misuse of our tools. If we’re successful this year then we’ll end 2018 on a much better trajectory.”
Earlier this year, the company also banned crypto ads on its platform calling them as a means to “promote financial products and services that are frequently associated with misleading or deceptive promotional practices.” Facebook’s decision of banning crypto ads was followed by other tech giants like Google and Twitter joining the bandwagon.
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