According to insider Nathaniel Popper, journalist at the New York Times and in close contact with major investors, Facebook is looking to get VC firms (Venture Capital) to invest in their Facebook Cryptocurrency project. The company is very interested in bringing their own stablecoin to the market. As you can read in his tweet from last week: they are targeting big sums!
Stablecoin versus Facebook Coin
For the people who are less familiar with the crypto world: “stable coin” is a term used in cryptocurrency to describe cryptocurrencies meant to hold stable values. For example, Tether (USDT) is a blockchain based asset meant to trade for $1 USD. Tether is a “price-stable cryptocurrency” that is “pegged” to the U.S. dollar.
Each stable coin has a unique set of mechanisms, but they all generally work the same way: they hold collateral of some type and manage the supply to help incentivize the market to trade the coin for no more or less than $1 (info from cryptocurrencyfacts).
But I don't think this will be the exact model for the Facebook Coin. Perhaps the crypto coin will look more like a Binance Coin. The cryptocoin appeared in 2017 after an ICO release by Binance. In October 2018 Binance extensively explained the many functions and uses of the BNB coin. The article can be read on Medium.
The Binance Coin is best viewed as a kind of gas on the network. Supply and demand therefore translate into the pricing of the Binance Coin. Below you can see the price evolution in recent years.
The many functions of BNB (securing money in times of need, storing on various wallets, trading as an altcoin, ...) thus creates a balance for the investor.
You can also see that the price formation of Binance Coin differs from the price formation of traditional crypto coins such as Bitcoin and Ethereum. Therefore BNB is also used by users as an optimization tool for their crypto portfolios.
By taking this path, I suspect that Facebook wants to put extra focus on one of their strengths: ecommerce!
The payment method on Facebook
Until now Facebook didn't have the intention (at least not out loud) of setting up its own exchange. In this way it wasn't possible for users and advertisers to actually perform transactions with each other.
This crypto currency could all change that, because the Facebook Coin will most likely become the payment method on Facebook. That is also their approach to turn to investors: we give you the upside of trading on Facebook.
This can be a major breakthrough in the network effect of the crypto market, regardless of how you personally think about the combination of crypto and Facebook. One of the largest network players in the world again focuses on crypto. It's like throwing a stone into the water. It can be a re-launch of many altcoins, who get 'a proof of concept'. This could be the ultimate signal for the large mass of investors to also invest in crypto.