Social Media Giant Facebook Inc. Expands Its Blockchain Efforts By Acquiring A Blockchain Startup

Facebook, the social media giant is expanding itself in blockchain world. Facebook has reportedly acquired Chainspace (a small startup behind a smart contracts platform) as its first blockchain-related acquisition, published by Cheddar on 4th Feb. the news demonstrates that the social media giant is growing its blockchain efforts through this acquisition not because of the service or products the company provides but for the skills or expertise of its staff.

Facebook made its first announcement of a new unit dedicated to blockchain in May 2018. David Marcus, the of head Facebook Messenger said that Facebook had created a group to “explore how to best leverage blockchain across Facebook, starting from scratch.” The researchers at Chainspace can help Facebook to scale blockchain across a range of applications. Thus, it is reported that four of the five researchers that worked on the academic white paper for Chainspace will be joining Facebook.

Whereas, on the other hand, a spokesperson from Facebook confirmed Cheddar that Facebook apparently hired the new researchers and it had not acquired any of Chainspace’s technology. Instead, some of its staffers had joined Facebook’s internal blockchain group. He also stated:
“Like many other companies, Facebook is exploring ways to leverage the power of blockchain technology. This new small team is exploring many different applications. We don’t have anything further to share.”

As per the career page of Facebook, it is evident that the social media giant is hiring for 11 blockchain positions. According to the JD, blockchain team at Facebook will function as “a startup within Facebook” adding:
“Our ultimate goal is to help millions of people with access to things they don’t have now – that could be things like healthcare, equitable financial services, or new ways to save or share information.”

Per Cheddar, Chainspace was founded by researchers from University College London. They worked towards alleviating blockchain scalability problems. The startup applied sharding which is a process of breaking a database into smaller units (known as shards) in order to reduce the scaling problems encountered by blockchain networks.

Many of the blockchain advocates are not happy with the technology for its security and trustless capabilities in processing transactions as it is still not scalable to the level of traditional payments systems like Visa or PayPal.