It is old news in blockchain world now that Facebook
It is old news in blockchain world now that Facebook has recently acquired blockchain startup Chainspace. After that exciting and surprising acquisition, Facebook is rumoured to be moving fast to acquire more of similar firms. The social media behemoth’s interest in blockchain is rising quite quickly as it has also attempted to hire executives from several blockchain companies and begun to turn its attention to the rising technology.
As the business benefits of blockchain become increasingly apparent to the world, even mainstream technology companies have started to sit up and take notice of it. Facebook seems to be the latest one to have joined the bandwagon. Even though the recent times have seen crypto and blockchain media outlets peppered with headlines about how Facebook has hired talent from blockchain firms, few would have expected it to straightaway acquire a blockchain firm.
Now, however, rumours are afloat that Facebook is strongly focused on finding a firm footing in the blockchain world. Till a while ago, Facebook had not really told the world much about its plans with this incredible new technology. That is precisely why its Chainspace acquisition sprung a whole new surprise on the world of blockchain enthusiasts.
Now, it seems that Facebook might just sign deals ranging up to the value of tens of millions of dollars to make sure its foray into the blockchain space. It is reportedly taking an “acqui-hire” approach, where it acquires a startup from an investors’ portfolio, in order to be able to hire some of the allied talent from the same source
According to anonymous sources mentioned referred to by those sharing these rumours, Facebook has had spirited discussions about such acquisition plans with MIT scholar-founded Algorand, stablecoin startup Basis, an encrypted message application with support for Bitcoin and ZCash called Keybase and more. Facebook itself has rubbished the upsurge of rumours but that has not stopped the rumour mill from churning out these names.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is clearly excited about the potential of this technology, having written the following earlier:
“I’m looking forward to bringing groups of experts together to discuss and help work through these topics.For example, one of the most interesting questions in technology right now is about centralization vs decentralization. A lot of us got into technology because we believe it can be a decentralizing force that puts more power in people’s hands. (The first four words of Facebook’s mission have always been “give people the power”.) Back in the 1990s and 2000s, most people believed technology would be a decentralizing force. But today, many people have lost faith in that promise. 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.”