Facebook buys Chainspace
Finally it has happened: Facebook has acquired its first blockchain-based business, according to Cheddar and other media sources.
The business in question is Chainspace, a small blockchain startup founded by researchers from University College London. It has been building a decentralised “smart contracts” system to facilitate payments and other services through blockchain technology.
In fact, Facebook has actually acquired the Chainspace team, something, which is called an “aqui-hire” in Silicon Valley language. But Cheddar believes that it “is the clearest sign yet of Facebook’s ambition to be a big player in the nascent blockchain industry.” Furthermore, a Facebook spokesperson told Cheddar that while the social media giant had hired the team, it had not acquired any of Chainspace’s technology.
According to Chainspace’s white paper published in August 2017, the team wanted to build a “distributed ledger platform for high-integrity and transparent processing of transactions within a decentralised system.” In layman’s terms, it means that Chainspace wanted to improve the speed of transactions to make it more competitive with services like Visa. As Cointelegraph points out: “While many blockchain advocates laud the technology for its security and trustless capabilities in processing transactions, it is currently not scalable to the level of traditional payments systems like Visa or PayPal. The current number of transactions per second (tps) on the Bitcoin network fluctuates between two and 18, Visa is capable of 2,000 tps, while PayPal can process 115 tps.”
Two of the white paper authors, Alberto Sonnino and George Danezis, apparently already list their employment as blockchain researchers in Facebook’s London office on LinkedIn. It didn’t take them long!
Facebook’s plans for crypto and blockchain are of huge interest to everyone in the crypto community, because what it chooses to do could radically change the industry, as would Amazon’s entrance into the crypto sphere with a native token. How Facebook plans to use the skills of the Chainspace team is what we’ll all be watching closely and as we wait for the BIG announcement. What do you think Facebook will launch that is blockchain related?
