On Tuesday Facebook reorganized the duties of its product executives, in the process creating an unusual new division: David Marcus, formerly head of Facebook’s Messenger app, will now lead a team of fewer than a dozen people dedicated to blockchain technology, according to Recode. He’ll be joined by notable executives including Kevin Weil, former VP of product at Instagram, and James Everingham, VP of engineering at Instagram.

It’s not clear what the company is up to here. Facebook representatives did not immediately respond to questions from WIRED. In the absence of any specifics, WIRED’s Erin Griffith and Sandra Upson, who write about blockchain technology, offered to speculate:

Erin: We knew Facebook would at least dabble in this area. The risk of missing out---just in case the crypto evangelists are correct and blockchain technology turns out to be bigger than the internet revolution---is too great to ignore. Facebook made this mistake with one big tech wave---mobile. For the past year, Facebook has been sniffing around blockchains in “exploratory mode,” with corporate development staffer Morgan Beller learning about the tech and reporting back to top execs.

Sandra: So do you think they’re mostly covering their butts? I’m wondering about the biggest, most audacious thing Facebook could do in this space.

Erin: It’s in their playbook! The $2 billion they spent on Oculus VR and the $19 billion they spent on WhatsApp were essentially butt-covering moves. There aren’t really any blockchain acquisitions that make a ton of sense, and I doubt the company would be eager to make an acquisition while cryptocurrencies are under regulatory scrutiny and the big tech is under antitrust scrutiny.

Sandra: It seems too early in the blockchain lifecycle for a company like Facebook to make a major acquisition. I could see them scouting out the landscape and deciding that no one is established enough---or threatening enough---to be worth snapping up.

Erin: Even before today’s news, there’s been plenty of speculation about what Facebook could do here. One example that bubbled up after the Cambridge Analytica scandal is to use blockchain technology to give Facebook users more control of their personal data. But, like a lot of blockchain-related ideas, it seems more speculative than a legitimate use case.

Sandra: Let’s play that out for a second. A personal data blockchain would have to be private, otherwise everything you posted could be read by everyone on the internet. So maybe a user “owns” her data, but in practice I don’t see how that translates into anything meaningful within the walls of Facebook. The company would surely still use the data to sell and target ads, and if a user decided to leave the platform, the data would still be written into Facebook’s blockchain.

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Erin: Recode’s report suggests Facebook might use blockchain technology for encrypted data storage, though I’m not sure why that requires, or would even benefit from, a distributed ledger. Already companies that dove head-first into blockchain projects are learning that they could get the same results more cheaply using current technology.

Sandra: At least one cryptoblogger speculated that Facebook might launch its own tokens and distribute them to shareholders and users. Users whose posts hit some kind of engagement metric would earn tokens. If users held FaceBucks, or whatever they're called, they’d have a personal financial stake in the platform’s success. But this argument seems weak to me. Attaching money to user performance creates the wrong incentives. The point of being active on the platform is to have “meaningful social interactions,” Facebook tells us, so turning it into a side hustle distorts that social goal.

Erin: Lots of startups that have “pivoted to blockchain” have taken this tack, but it can definitely create bad incentives, a danger Facebook is familiar with. Facebook essentially demoted Zynga from its platform for using the kind of spammy “growth hacking” tactics that engagement-based rewards incentivize back in 2011. (Not to mention---issuing Facebucks would not sit well with other crypto startups selling tokens, considering Facebook banned initial coin offerings from advertising on its platform earlier this year!)