Tech giants are exploring blockchain and Facebook will not be left behind. The company has reportedly promoted one of its senior engineers, Evan Cheng, as Director of Engineering for its new blockchain division.
Igniting the blockchain division
Last May, Facebook Messenger director David Marcus announced that he would be leaving the post to help the company explore the uses of blockchain technology.
“I am setting up a small group to explore how to better leverage Blockchain on Facebook, starting from scratch,” Marcus announced through a post on his Facebook page. This came months after Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s announcement that he had begun exploring possible uses of cryptocurrencies for Facebook. Blockchain is the underlying technology behind the cryptocurrencies brought to fame by Bitcoin.
Another senior engineer from Facebook joins Marcus.
Taking blockchain seriously
Now that one of its senior engineers has transferred to the blockchain division, the social media giant seems more serious than ever. Evan Cheng’s LinkedIn profile supports his transfer as he recently became Director of Blockchain Engineering. Previously, Cheng was known as the head of programming languages and runtimes for Facebook. He held the position for three years.
Before that, Cheng was at Apple and worked as a senior manager of low-level tools. He also has a background in backup engineering and build technology. Cheng’s track record showed him tweeting about blockchain. Additionally, he previously served as a splitter for various blockchain startups / projects such as ChainLink and Zilliqa.
“It means that it is [Cheng’s promotion] not just an exploratory project, “TechCrunch quoted a source that monitors the blockchain space. According to the same source, putting Cheng in the blockchain division means that the project is important because it knows a thing or two about scalability and performance.
As of the first quarter of 2018, Facebook has more than 2 billion monthly active users worldwide, making it a likely target for security threats due to the vast amount of valuable information it currently possesses. In recent news, the company has been involved in different data breach scandals in which data from 87 million Facebook users was collected and used in political campaigns. Despite this, the number of monthly users still increased by 13 percent compared to the first quarter of 2017. Seeing the significant impact of social media in today’s society, it is time that Facebook and social networking sites Similar companies find ways to protect their users from unscrupulous manipulation.
Facebook’s move to explore blockchain may be one of the steps to address these issues. With the decentralized and immutable design of blockchain, it bodes well for streamlining processes and strengthening security for data handling in many industries.