An article by the New York Times suggests that the highly rumored Facebook made cryptocurrency is scheduled to come out soon and may be called “Facebook Coin”.
Initial reports indicated that Facebook was working on its own cryptocurrency for instant messaging platform What’s App that will be pegged to the US Dollar to minimize volatility generating a lot of buzz on the possible effects of such a development.
The New York Times in a recent article confirmed this by citing five anonymous sources who are close to developments at Facebook concerning the tech gaint’s upcoming cryptocurrency.
According to them, the upcoming coin will be integrated into Facebook-owned messaging platforms, allowing seamless transactions between users. This presents a very interesting possibility as Facebook recently announced that it will soon unify all three messaging platforms WhatsApp, Messenger, and Instagram into one platform.
When combined, the platform will boast of over 2 billion users who will be exposed to Facebook coin and the functionalities of the currency. The NY Times article also acknowledges the fact that Facebook will not be the first and only messaging platform to integrate a native cryptocurrency as Korea’s Kakao, Line in Japan, and Russian-developed Telegram are also doing same.
Facebook’s development of a cryptocurrency is being led by ex-PayPal president David Marcus who got to work shortly after Telegram had sealed close to $1.7 billion through two private initial coin offerings(ICOs) for its upcoming Telegram Open Network (TON).
Three out five sources who spoke to NY Times noted that Facebook has employed ver 50 engineers to work on the cryptocurrency. Two other sources mentioned that the assigned team has been given an office with separate key-card access to keep the details private from other employees.
All five sources indicated that the rumored pegging to a traditional currency is true but instead, of one national currency, Facebook’s stablecoin will be pegged to three different currencies.
At the moment, the source indicated that Facebook has started contacting exchanges to discuss listing and reserve the name of a currency called “Facebook Coin”. With this report indicating an announcement of Facebook coin sooner than later, the next couple of months will be interesting to watch.
