Facebook hires Chainspace team to add blockchain talent

Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...

Facebook is starting to throw its weight around in the blockchain industry. According to Cheddar, a general news site, the social media giant has gone and hired the Chainspace team, a group founded by researchers out of the University College London.

Prior to the acquisition, Chainspace was working on decentralized smart contracts for payments systems. Their white paper outlined a “distributed ledger platform for high-integrity and transparent processing of transactions within a decentralized system.”

Cheddar noted that Facebook’s move is typically called an “acqui-hire” in Silicon Valley, where rather than buy out a company, nearly the entire workforce is hired instead. Facebook will get the talent from Chainspace, but not the projects they were working on. Several of the Chainspace team members have already updated their LinkedIn profiles to indicate they now work for Facebook.

This move makes sense for Facebook, as they aren’t completely new to the blockchain space; they’re just getting serious. In May 2018, David Marcus started leading Facebook’s blockchain task force, with the goal of deciding how they could use the technology to improve the site. They then tapped Evan Cheng to lead blockchain development in the company. They then brought on former Coinbase board member David Marcus to lead their blockchain strategy, making it quite clear they were serious about the technology.

This development also follows rumors in December that Facebook was looking to develop its own cryptocurrency to help facilitate money transfers between users. Reportedly, it would be a U.S.-based stablecoin and have an initial focus on the Indian market.

The inertia of blockchain developments at Facebook definitely suggests that we can expect some serious developments to come out of Menlo Park in the near future.

If they are looking at repeating Chainspace’s project of fast, transparent transactions, it’s curious why they are not integrating existing cryptocurrency technologies that are proving very capable of the task, like Bitcoin SV (BSV).

The BSV blockchain is built to scale massively, which would be necessary for Facebook’s 2 billion user base. With 103MB blocks already proven to work, and bigger on the way, BSV is proving it already has the talent and the vision necessary to meet the needs of a serious enterprise like Mark Zuckerberg’s brainchild.