Facebook’s Cryptocurrency Could be Coming a Lot Sooner Than Expected

Reports have surfaced that the social network giant, Facebook is going through talks with different cryptocurrency exchanges in regards to them selling the ‘Facebook Coin’ to their customers.

The Facebook cryptocurrency could be launched a lot sooner than expected. In a new report by the New York Times, they cite numerous anonymous sources which say that employees at Facebook are already shopping the coin to cryptocurrency exchanges while “trying to get the product out in the first half of the year.”

Control issues

Currently, there isn’t much known about Facebook's venture into the crypto sphere, as well as the level of control that the American social media company will get when the cryptocurrency eventually goes live to the public.

If Zuckerberg's company wants to really focus on the decentralised aspect of crypto then it will be a lot harder for them to make profits off their project, since that is the whole point of blockchain technology.

2 billion user base

At the end of last year, reports surfaced by Bloomberg which showed that the social media behemoth aim to roll out a stablecoin for WhatsApp. Nevertheless, the New York Times revealed that the firm plans to integrate the cryptocurrency into two of its other big properties, Messenger and Instagram. This would give the coin an almost unlimited amount of exposure and publicity. The audience that those three apps have is a collective of 2.7 billion users.

Hiring

The blockchain team at Facebook team is currently undergoing an expansion and they have now put up several job offerings for that area. Facebook launched a team for exploring blockchain technology back in May with David Marcus fronting the effort.

Blockchain

Speaking on blockchain, the CEO of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg spoke to a Professor of Law at Harvard University on how he believes this system will function, “you basically take your information, you store it on some decentralized system and you have the choice of whether to log in in different places and you’re not going through an intermediary. There’s a lot of things that I think would be quite attractive about that.” The founder continued on this topic saying:

“For developers, one of the things that is really troubling about working with our system, or Google’s system for that matter, or having to deliver services through Apple’s App Store is that you don’t want to have an intermediary between serving the people who are using your service and you. Where someone can just say hey, we as a developer have to follow your policy and if we don’t, then you can cut off access to the people we are serving. That’s kind of a difficult and troubling position to be in.”