Bloomberg announced this Friday that the world’s leading social network intends to set up its own cryptocurrency. This currency will be used to send money online via the Whatsapp instant messaging application. The company is targeting India as the first consumer of this cryptocurrency because of the 480 million Indians connected to the Internet. For this reason, the company intends to establish its own blockchain approach. The blockchain developer is the fastest growing job in the last four years, according to a report on the LinkedIn website. Major companies are constantly investing in this technology, like the American giant Facebook.
Last May, Facebook appointed David Marcus, former PayPal director, and former Facebook Messenger manager, to head the blockchain branch of Facebook. According to Bloomberg, this branch consists of about forty people, including engineers, product managers, academics and legal experts with experience in cryptocurrency and payments. According to the Cheddar site, a financial information network, we can name the following personalities in this branch of Facebook:
Tomer Barel, Vice President of Risk and Operations at Facebook for the “Facebook Block Chain” and previously responsible for Fraud and Risk Management, former Executive Vice President at PayPal; Meron Colbeci, Product Manager for the Facebook Block Chain, lead product management for PayPal’s personal payments; Christina Smedley, the Group’s brand and marketing manager, was responsible for PayPal’s global communications and brand marketing, to name a few.
“Like many other companies, Facebook is exploring ways to harness the power of blockchain technology. This new team is exploring many different applications. We have nothing more to share,” said a company spokesperson in a statement. The blockchain is a transparent, secure information storage and transmission technology that works without a central control point. In a broader sense, a blockchain is a database that contains the history of all exchanges between its users since their inception. This database is secure and distributed: It is shared by its various users, without intermediaries, so that anyone can check the validity of the chain.
Setting up such a team was not easy, says the Cheddar site. The company is exposed to many public scandals and therefore has difficulty gaining the trust of specialists, workers, and experts. One example is the Cambridge-Analytica scandal, which keeps people talking about it, as the European Parliament last October called for a full review of Facebook. However, Cheddar states that the ultimate goal of the company’s initiative would be to give its nearly two billion users access to services (fair financial services, new ways of storing or exchanging information) that they currently do not have or simply make electronic payments without using a traditional bank.
However, it should be remembered that the cryptocurrency industry appeared to be declining last October after an unprecedented decline in transaction volumes.
Juniper Research, a research firm specializing in identifying and evaluating the high-growth market within the digital ecosystem, conducted a study on the cryptographic machine market. He warns that many indicators for the cryptocurrency world point to market weakness, particularly due to a gradual decline in transaction volumes. In its study “The Future of Cryptocurrency: Bitcoin & Altcoin Trends & Challenges 2018-2023”, Juniper Research pointed out that the decline in the daily exchange volume of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrency is a particularly negative signal for the evaluation of the cryptocurrency industry.
Facebook may have better chances of creating a stable currency, according to Bloomberg. It would be the first major technology company to launch such a project. “The company’s relations with India are strained, especially because some false information disseminated through WhatsApp has led to violence in the country. Facebook, however, sees an enormous growth opportunity for the country. India has 480 million Internet users, just behind China. This number should reach 737M.
Related posts:
Leave a Reply