Facebook Creates Blockchain Team in Major Company Shakeup

Facebook Inc named new leaders for some of its main divisions, including the core social network, WhatsApp and Messenger, in the biggest management reshuffling since the company’s founding. The team is led by David Marcus, former PayPal President & current Coinbase board member. According to Recode, the team will include fewer than a dozen people, for now.

They’ve crafted many new experiences from video chat to P2P payments, a capable camera and new features like games. He also managed the push into customer service bots, shopping, and advertising. So, he seems to be the flawless guy for building a service from scratch and taking it to new heights.

It is however still not clear as to how Facebook plans to implement and deploy the blockchain technology or its related solutions to its platform.

At a time when cryptocurrencies and blockchain are being increasingly associated with just money-making schemes and not with technical advancements, it is vital that more research happens for implementation of blockchain technology in real-world use-cases. It can be used to verify a user’s ID without having to go through a central service. He has been with the social media giant since 2008 and has been the face of its profiles team.

But its clear that the USA -based social network remains interested in the technology behind the currencies, even if it may never let users transact with bitcoin on the website. Some internal changes will be forthcoming and a blockchain division will be added to the overall company structure.

Blockchain, the technology that underpins cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin, could have other business applications as a ledger for recording transactions, although Marcus said Facebook was “starting from scratch”.

Fortunately for Facebook’s staff, no firings were made.

Messenger’s head of product, Stan Chudnovsky, is set to replace Marcus as the head of Messenger. Marcus will be joined with Instagram’s head of engineering, James Everingham, and Instagram’s product lead, Kevin Weil. At least 3,000 ads linked to Russian accounts ran during the 2016 election cycle; those ads may have reached at least 146 million Facebook and Instagram users.

But on the same call, COO Sheryl Sandberg noted that of the 25 million business profiles now on Instagram, less than a 10th are advertisers.

Exec Chris Cox appears to be taking the biggest power move here as he will lead the new Family of Apps group. Reuters noted that WhatsApp’s two co-founders announced their resignations in recent months, opening the door to closer integration of that operation.

Following the departure of WhatsApp’s founder Jan Koum last week, the new head of WhatsApp will be Chris Daniels. The new updates have already started creating a buzz in the media right now.