News reaching Ethereum World News from Cheddar indicate that facebook has made its first acquisition of a blockchain startup company. The team at the social media giant has quietly acqui-hired the team behind Chainspace: a smart contracts platform. An exact figure of the deal between the two firms is not not been made available but Chainspace was looking to raise approximately $4 Million from an initial round of funding. This is according to people familiar with the matter.

Facebook’s History of Acquisitions

The move by facebook does not come as a shock to many as the social media giant has had a history of acquiring startups such as Instagram, Whatsapp, Snaptu, Face.com, Oculus VR and a few others. In the case of Chainspace, the acqui-hire is more or less buying out the company primarily for the skills and expertise of its staff rather than the products and services it supplies.

This then means that the team at Chainspace will be integrated into the yet to be made public vision of the blockchain division at facebook. Visitors of the Chainspace website are met with the following message at the header section of the website.

We’re excited to announce that the team is moving on to something new. Chainspace code and documentation will still be open source, and all previously published academic work remains available

According to Cheddar, an unnamed facebook spokesperson confirmed that the firm is not acquiring any of Chainspace’s technology. The source explained the following:

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.

The First of Many for facebook?

Using past records of facebook acquiring technology companies such as Whatsapp and Instagram, it is safe to conclude that Chainspace might be the first of many blockchain startups to be acquired by the social media giant. To note is that facebook has been rumored to be developing a stablecoin to power cross-border transactions on Whatsapp. Therefore, teams and individuals who have similar work experience will be highly sought after by the firm moving forward.

About Chainspace

The project’s 2017 whitepaper discussed creating a decentralized infrastructure (or distributed ledger) that supports user defined smart contracts and executes user-supplied transactions on their subjects. The system would be scalable through sharding and the execution of transaction would be verifiable and through the use of S-BAC. The latter is a novel distributed atomic commit protocol for sharding generic smart contract transactions across multiple Byzantine nodes. S-BAC also coordinates the nodes to ensure safety, liveness and security.

What are your thoughts on facebook acqui-hiring the team at Chainspace? Will this be the first of many blockchain acquisitions by facebook? Please let us know in the comment section below.

Disclaimer: This article is not meant to give financial advice. Any additional opinion herein is purely the author’s and does not represent the opinion of Ethereum World News or any of its other writers. Please carry out your own research before investing in any of the numerous cryptocurrencies available. Thank you.