In the midst of its biggest executive shakeup in company history and only a few months removed from one of the biggest data and privacy scandals of the decade, Facebook announced earlier this week what many have anticipated for years: The social media and tech giant will enter the blockchain arena.
David Marcus, previously the head of Facebook’s Messenger service, will lead a new group assessing the underlying blockchain technology of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.
Marcus, who joined the board of Coinbase in December, stated he was “setting up a small group to explore how to best leverage Blockchain across Facebook, starting from scratch.”
Though Facebook notoriously banned cryptocurrency advertising on its platform earlier this year in a move that was seen as part of a larger establishment attack on decentralized technology, owner and CEO Mark Zuckerberg publicly pondered the role of blockchain only last year in a post that caused many to wonder whether Facebook would soon get involved with the blockchain.
Zuckerberg wrote the following on his own Facebook page as part of an annual ‘goals and reflections’ type of missive:
“With the rise of a small number of big tech companies — and governments using technology to watch their citizens — many people now believe technology only centralizes power rather than decentralizes it.
“There are important counter-trends to this — like encryption and cryptocurrency — that take power from centralized systems and put it back into people’s hands. But they come with the risk of being harder to control. 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.”
Many analysts interpreted this as a clue that Zuckerberg wanted to use Facebook’s considerable capital to get involved with what seems to be the inevitable future of many industries. This was why many were shocked in January when the company followed Google and banned cryptocurrency ads, a move Twitter soon replicated.
Then Cambridge Analytica happened, and though we won’t know for sure how much damage Facebook sustained until the company releases the next earnings report, it’s clear it took massive blows to its reputation, business model, and customer base.
The new foray into blockchain is at this point only an exploratory mission — probably more of a defensive move designed to make sure Facebook doesn’t get left behind as a vibrant new technology sits right before it — so it may be premature to expect Zuckerberg to be releasing FaceCoins anytime soon.
That being said, while many Wall Street financial analysts have noted the “bulletproof” nature of Facebook, many others have noted the at least equally impressive fortitude of cryptocurrency and the blockchain in a strange new world with a much less forgiving environment. We might look back someday and wonder why the merger of Facebook and blockchain didn’t seem inevitable.
By Jake Anderson / Creative Commons / Anti-Media / Report a typo
