As we all know Facebook is the world’s largest social media network, toping up the charts with more than two billion users distributed across many different platforms. Facebook was launched on February 4, 2004, by Mark Zuckerberg followed by his Harvard College roommates and since then Facebook has a constant rise in users as well as usage of the platform.
Even though last year was hard for Facebook with loss of nearly $9 billion due to all the privacy issues as well as personal information leaking, but the company came up strong in the first quartile of 2019. Facebook is currently 6th place in the world’s most valuable companies with $413.25 billion.
Since the Facebook breach hit the news, with all the personal information leaking and security problems, they have made huge changes in the system providing users the safety of their personal information as well as fully encrypting their messages. This way they plan to ensure that Facebook does not know what users write to each other.
Facebook clearly is not planning to stop, as recently the reports hit the public that the company is secretly working on developing their own cryptocurrency. As mentioned, the project is still in secret so we do not have much information. Reports say that Facebook has invested serious resources (money and work-force) in some payment system and the serious team is working round the clock on some public blockchain effort. The company has made collaboration with many financial and technology companies around the world that do research for bitcoin and crypto.
This information lit a fire in every major financial institution, as Facebook starts to develop a rival for bitcoin. When we analyze the market for cryptocurrency we can see why this might be the next main thing that will start the process of real money extinction. When Bitcoin started 10 years ago, it went from zero to 40 million to 100 million users (estimates are rough), and financial experts compare it to Facebook with billions everyday users.
As we witnessed with other cryptocurrencies, they had trouble with keeping a stable value of their currency which can bring the project to its knees. Meanwhile, Facebook has started to plan to raise money in use for the collateral for its cryptocurrency through its many platforms and keep the value of their currency as stable as possible. The company has plans to make money off it, using WhatsApp messaging app as a digital payments network.
Facebook is teaming up for the new project as well. The company is hiring around 100 software engineers that will be based in London and provide additional support to Dublin. Former PayPal president David Marcus is hired by Facebook and set as a head of the company’s blockchain division.
Their new system will be a rival for today’s cryptocurrencies for sure. Since one of the biggest companies in the world decided to invest in cryptocurrency, it could be something revolutionary and change the way world functions, which will not be strange from Facebook just because they already changed the world once. Facebook did not announce any information regarding the new project, but as experts analyze the moves the company is making, they are diffidently working on something big. The company gave a statement that they are researching new applications for new technology about cryptocurrency. Experts cannot make clear how this system will function and how people can obtain their cryptocurrencies yet.
If Facebook develops some sort of crypto coin, its path will be much easier compared to the cryptocurrencies that started this horse race. We can only imagine what the future will bring to us. Maybe we will pay with our smart devices using some sort of Facebook coins buying groceries. As for now, we will have to wait and maybe witness the next great thing that might shape the future of our finance.
