Facebook is launching its own blockchain division as part of a broader reorganization of its executive line, several sources confirmed Recode today . The decision comes four months after CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a Facebook post that he wanted the company to "deepen and study the positive and negative aspects of" cryptocurrencies. "
For now, the company says little about Its blockchain division, but we do know that David Marcus, who served as vice president of messaging products and oversaw Facebook Messenger, will lead the blockchain group, former PayPal CEO Marcus has been interested in long-term payments. and currently serves on the bitcoin exchange board Coinbase. "After almost four incredibly rewarding years as a Messenger leader, I decided it was time to take on a new challenge," Marcus wrote in a Facebook post, "I'm organizing a small group to explore the best way to take advantage of Blockchain throughout Facebook, starting from scratch. "
The current vice president of Instagram product, Kevin Weil, will leave that role to join the Facebook blockchain team under Marcus, the two positions are the only ones announced so far for the team, and they come in the middle of many other employee reshuffles.
The company restructuring comes a little less than a month after Zuckerberg testified before Congress about the Cambridge Analytica data breach scandal, and five months after Zuckerberg promised to fix Facebook As part of your New Year's resolution, if adding a blockchain initiative to your arsenal is part of the solution for Facebook, you may find more government scrutiny as a result.We have communicated with Facebook to get more information and we will update this publication if we receive an answer.