Facebook may soon launch its own bitcoin

Facebook is exploring the creation of its own cryptocurrency, a virtual token that would allow its billions of users around the world to make electronic payments, people familiar with Facebook’s plans told Cheddar.

“They are very serious about it,” said one of the people, who asked not to be identified discussing unannounced plans.

Facebook started studying blockchain almost a year ago, when a member of its corporate development team, Morgan Beller, began looking at how the social platform could use the emerging technology.

At the time, Beller was the only Facebook employee devoted to studying blockchain, the digital and decentralized ledger that underpins cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum.

Rumours about a Facebook-branded virtual currency have been swirling for a while. Earlier this year, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said he would be studying cryptocurrencies and decentralising technologies like blockchain as part of his plans to improve Facebook.

At the time, he said: “There are important counter-trends to this – like encryption and cryptocurrency – that take power from centralised systems and put it back into people’s hands.

“I’m interested to go deeper and study the positive and negative aspects of these technologies, and how best to use them in our services.”

And Facebook using cryptocurrency for payments makes sense. There are billions of people around the world that use the social media both for work and in their free-time.

Facebook has made a lot of its money from advertising; selling ads for products to these two billion users. The company would stand to gain if it allowed people to directly make payments for these products, using its own infrastructure based on the blockchain.

Reportedly, Beller’s work was thrust into the spotlight this week when Facebook announced that the vice president in charge of the Messenger app, David Marcus, would lead a new team to “explore how to best leverage blockchain across Facebook, starting from scratch.”

David Marcus, the man behind Facebook Messenger has been overseeing development since 2014, tasked a small group of people to explore the potential applications of blockchain technology. He said; “I’m setting up a small group to explore how to best leverage Blockchain across Facebook, starting from scratch.”

It should be noted that Marcus has a keen interest in cryptocurrencies, and is not only an investor of Bitcoin, but also joined the Coinbase board six months ago. Despite these recent plans, just a few months ago in February, Marcus said that he had no plans to integrate cryptocurrency into its applications, saying;

“Payments using crypto right now is just very expensive, super slow, so the various communities running the different blockchains and the different assets need to fix all the issues, and then when we get there someday, maybe we’ll do something.”

Although it would appear that this has all changed now, time will tell whether a Facebook coin will appear or not.