Facebook is looking into creating its own cryptocurrency, according to a report by Cheddar.
Reportedly, unnamed sources familiar with the matter said Facebook was "very serious" about its consideration of building its own decentralized digital currency.
Picture Source- https://smartereum.com/14233/what-would-facebook-do-with-its-own-cryptocurrency
A top problem in the world of decentralized blockchain apps is how you bring your identity with you. Securely connecting your wallet, blockchain-based virtual goods and biographical info to new dApps can be a laborious process. Users typically have to type in long, complicated alphanumeric keys that are tough to remember and annoying to input. User experience design around identity in the blockchain space lags far behind what we’re used to with mainstream social apps like Facebook Connect, which uses an OAuth single sign-on to let you instantly join apps without creating a new username and password, or filling out a profile and uploading a photo.
It's thought that if Facebook offered a cryptocurrency, it could create a seamless payment platform on the site that could be accessible even by people who are unbanked.
A Facebook spokesman told Business Insider that the company was "exploring many different applications."
The announcement from Mr Marcus that he was forming a new blockchain team comes just a few months after his boss, Mr Zuckerberg, revealed that his “personal challenge” for the year would be to explore the benefits of cryptocurrency and blockchain technology.
“One of the most interesting questions in technology right now is about centralization vs decentralization,” Mr Zuckerberg said in a Facebook post on 4 January.
Encryption and cryptocurrency "take power from centralized systems and put it back into people’s hands," he wrote. 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.”