Facebook’s Blockchain Division Taking Shape After New Appointments

Facebook has once again reaffirmed its commitment to exploring blockchain technology by appointing Evan Cheng as the director of engineering, for the recently launched division. The tech giant has also appointed former VP of product at Instagram, Kevin Weil, as the VP of product at the new division.

Cheng joins the division with vast experience having worked at Apple for many years. He joined Facebook in 2015 and has been working at the company’s programming languages and runtimes division. He is currently listed as an advisor to blockchain projects Zilliqa and ChainLink.

Cheng and Weil join the blockchain team, which Facebook put together, led by David Marcus who also doubles up as Coinbase board member. The team consists of less than a dozen people and reports directly to the Chief Technology Officer, Mike Schroepfer,

The team is to explore blockchain technology and its potential use cases in Facebook among other applications. Earlier this year Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg reiterated his intentions to study cryptocurrencies, which is one of the major applications of the emerging technology.

Facebook just like other tech giants is trying to explore ways of countering the effects of centralized systems. Blockchain technology is seen as an appropriate technology that would accelerate decentralization especially in social media applications where people have complained from time to time of the fact they don’t have control over what they share online.

“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,” said Mr. Zuckerberg.

Facebook is yet to make it clear how it plans to use blockchain technology in its operation. However, considering the way it is pursuing the technology, the tech giant could soon unveil something ground breaking built around the technology.

In light with the data sharing scandal it faced early in the year, Facebook could as well use the technology to offer users more control of their data in future. In addition to the blockchain, the tech giant has also lessened its tough stance on cryptocurrencies having recently lifted a ban that targeted digital currencies ads.