Last week, internet and social media giant Facebook revealed the network’s intentions to develop blockchain technology, though it’s still unclear for what purpose.

The former head of Facebook Messenger, David Marcus, announced this week that he will lead an exploratory blockchain group that will report directly to the company’s CTO, Mike Schroepfer.

The announcement came in the form of a Facebook post on Tuesday 8th May following rumours that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is interested in creating his own cryptocurrency. But very few specifics were given regarding Mr Marcus’ team and their actual work.

“After nearly four unbelievably rewarding years leading Messenger, I have decided it was time for me to take on a new challenge,” Mr Marcus said.

“I’m setting up a small group to explore how to best leverage blockchain across Facebook, starting from scratch.”

Crypto enthusiasts, entrepreneurs as well blockchain developers see the technology as a way for Facebook to begin addressing some of the many problems the company faced concerning people’s privacy. Last month, the tech giant revealed that the personal data of up to 87 million of its users was compromised by “malicious actors”.

By pursuing the path towards blockchain adoption in its business model, Gaurang Torvekar, CEO of a blockchain-powered social network for professionals called Indorse, believes Facebook could prevent such breaches in the future.

“While there are other cheaper and faster alternatives for protecting user privacy, blockchain allows the users to control their data end-to-end,” Mr Torvekar told The Independent. “This might be an attractive use case for Facebook, considering the recent Cambridge Analytica scandal.”

With over 2 billion users, Facebook could create the world’s first ever blockchain-based cryptocurrency for mass market consumption, but this is only speculation.

Hypothetically, if the social network were to take this path, it would be following other tech platforms such as Telegram in launching its own rival to Bitcoin, possibly even fulfilling recent predictions made by former White House advisor Gary Cohn that there will be a global cryptocurrency.

Two weeks ago, the ex-economic advisor said that he expected to see a virtual currency reach worldwide mass adoption.

Following the general mantra of big business, he said: “I’m not a big believer in Bitcoin, but I am a believer in blockchain technology.” Well at least that’s a start.

Prior speculations as to how Facebook might implement its own cryptocurrency include paying its users to create and post content, which is what www.Minds.com has done via the Ethereum network.

The announcement comes just some months after Mr Zuckerberg revealed that his “personal challenge” for the year would be to explore the benefits of cryptocurrency and blockchain technology.

“One of the most interesting questions in technology right now is about centralization vs decentralization,” Mr Zuckerberg said in a Facebook post on 4 January.

He wrote: “Encryption and cryptocurrency take power from centralized systems and put it back into people’s hands. 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.”

However, despite Mr Zucherberg’s professed interest, Facebook has followed in the same footsteps as Google and Twitter, who outright banned all adverts promoting cryptocurrencies and initial coin offerings (ICOs) – which are considered a popular fundraising method for startups.

Still, there is yet hope. The firm’s ad policy director Rob Leathern said that the policy would be revisited once Facebook has a greater understanding of the budding space.