Why would Facebook hire Blockchain engineers?
Facebook has shaken the blockchain community when it announced that it would expand its exploratory blockchain team. This emotion has grown since an anonymous source close to the social media giant has revealed that Facebook is developing a stablecoin for its messaging service WhatsApp.
Stablecoins, which are a type of cryptocurrency tied closely to the US dollar to lower volatility, would make sense for both Facebook and the crypto market. The first news suggests that this development would be mainly (at least at the beginning) oriented towards the large user base of WhatsApp in India, which is the international leader in remittances, or money sent home by foreign workers. Stablecoins would offer a simple international money transfer solution for the Facebook Whatsapp user base, while at the same time lending the Facebook family name to the crypto community. As of now, however, these plans are still largely underdeveloped and speculative, so let's do some speculation about our – What else could Facebook do with 40 employees (and counts) now on its blockchain staff?
The first case of use that comes to mind is security: it's no secret that the company has suffered many attacks, losses and data problems. A very effective proprietary blockchain technology is its ability to maintain vast amounts of encrypted and accurately recorded data. There would be a privacy concern as a public blockchain could potentially offer users information on an open network, even if it is encrypted. However, for a use case like this, I imagine that Facebook would adopt the use of a private blockchain network on Hyperledger Fabric.
Another possibility is a deeper foray into e-commerce, a space in which Facebook curiously did not take much of it. The platform has a global library of business pages and also offers the possibility of sending jobs – why does Facebook not offer a full house? Shopify's style solution to its corporate users and transforms their business page into a complete pop-up e-commerce store and physically manage merchant transactions? With the amount of traffic and Facebook users, it could make a huge dent in the revenue of sites like Amazon at night. This opportunity opens the door to blockchain integration using technology to manage the merchant system and even track the logistics of goods purchased on Facebook to the customer's front door.
Obviously, the construction of systems like these requires many hours of work, so I would venture to hypothesize that the latter hired blockchains are potentially a skunkworks group that could perhaps prototype use cases to be proposed for the future of Facebook's success. before all the resources necessary to reach one of the above suggestions are fully committed and distributed. All I can be sure of is when they decide to go all together, the implementation will be huge and the impact will be just as big on the future success of the social giant.