Facebook is launching its own blockchain division as a part of its further reorganization of its executive lineup as confirmed by some of our sources. The move follows a post made by CEO Mark Zuckerberg saying that he wanted the company to “go deeper and study the positive and negative aspects of” cryptocurrencies.
The company is not saying a lot about its blockchain division at the moment. However, what we are aware of is that David Marcus who was in charge of overseeing Facebook Messenger and used to serve as the vice president of messaging products, will be running the blockchain group. The former CEO of PayPal, Marcus has for a long time been interested in payments and he currently serves on the board of bitcoin exchange Coinbase. David Marcus wrote in a Facebook post saying, “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.”
The current Instagram vice president of product, Kevin Weil will be leaving that role to join Facebook blockchain team under Marcus. The two positions are the only ones that have been announced so far for the team and have come amid a lot of other employee reshuffling.
The restructuring of the company comes a little under a month after Mark Zuckerberg testified in front of Congress about the Cambridge Analytica data breach scandal, and five months after Zuckerberg promised to fix Facebook as part of his New Year’s resolution. If adding a blockchain initiative to its arsenal is part of the solution for Facebook, it may as a result encounter a greater scrutiny from the government. On this note, we have reached out to Facebook for more information and will update this post if we hear back.
