The social media giant has employed several former PayPal employees for its mysterious blockchain project.
The inner workings of Facebook Inc.’s blockchain team are still
shrouded in secrecy, however it’s
staffing up, in line with people familiar with the group. Those people said that its product, which Bloomberg earlier reported will be a sort of cryptocurrency, might be announced as soon as
next quarter.
Launched last May, Facebook’s blockchain unit now counts 50 employees. a significant number of those employees—about one in five—used to work at a single company: PayPal
Holdings Inc. This
quasi-reunion, driven by the group’s leader, former PayPal president David
Marcus, is the latest
signal of Facebook’s wider ambitions to integrate payments into its platform.
The people Bloomberg
spoke to regarding the
project asked not to be identified because information about the blockchain team is closely guarded at
the social networking giant.
Facebook declined to comment on the
team organization or its plans.
According to Facebook insiders, the
blockchain group is
developing a stable coin , a type of
digital currency pegged to the U.S. dollar or a basket of currencies, making it less prone to swings in price. The primary country that will test the
new currency is claimed to
be Republic of India, a region that’s notably appealing
for Facebook because it
still has room to
expand. The merchandise could eventually allow users to transfer money for remittances via
WhatsApp through stable coin.
The company is already testing regular
payments in the country
through a product called WhatsApp
Pay. At Facebook’s developer conference, Mark Zuckerberg said that the corporate would soon expand WhatsApp payments
to other countries in addition. Money transfers and private commerce,
Zuckerberg said during his keynote, are “a part of the vision that I’m significantly excited about.”
Marcus left PayPal in 2014 to join Facebook as the head of its messenger product. There, he
spearheaded early monetization efforts
at messenger, helped
shepherd the service as a separate app that currently counts over 1 billion users and launched
an artificially intelligent
assistant known as M
(which was discontinued before a wide rollout). He left messenger last May, and proclaimed in a statement
that he was “setting up a small group to explore how to best leverage blockchain
across Facebook, starting from scratch.”
Marcus quickly brought some PayPal veterans with
him to the new Facebook group. One of his 1st hires was marketing leader Christina
Smedley, who will play a key role in packaging
the eventual blockchain
product, these people said . Smedley was employed by Marcus at PayPal
as vice president of global brand and communications, and later joined him at
Facebook messenger. A
communications veteran of both Amazon.com
Inc. and public relations company
Edelman, Smedley will probably be tasked with
convincing users to trust the social network with their finances, despite its
recent public relations and
privacy problems and a
broader skepticism over cryptocurrencies.
Other early hires on the blockchain team include Tomer Barel, who spent nearly a decade monitoring risk and fraud at
PayPal making his way up to the executive ranks, and John
Muller, who worked at
PayPal and its former parent company EBay Inc. for nearly 20 years. He will be the Facebook group’s
general counsel, consistent with a person familiar with company. That may prove to be a very difficult job, as rules around the still-nascent cryptocurrency market still shift and evolve.
The term “PayPal Mafia” was coined in the mid-2000s to describe the later feats of
PayPal’s early team, whose members include now-tech
luminaries like Elon Musk, Reid Hoffman
and Peter Thiel. Another, smaller PayPal mafia could be said to
be forming in the Facebook
blockchain group, which additionally includes Meron Colbeci, who worked with Marcus at PayPal
in product management, as the group’s
director of product, as well as
Nate Gonzalez, who worked
at PayPal on global peer-to-peer
payments, and who Colbeci
and Smedley helped recruit in October, one of the people said.
Despite its growing workers, though, the group remains in its early days. Moving beyond traditional payments to add blockchain-based stable coin transfers would
represent an enormous shift
for Facebook, with potential widespread implications for the worlds of finance
and retail. A wider rollout of the cryptocurrency was described in a recent Wall Street Journal report about the project. However,
Facebook insiders have cautioned that the corporate is
likely still far from releasing this sort of product.
“There remains a lack of
clarity on what Facebook is going to do, however it looks like the long-term vision is creating a sort of
marketplace model within Facebook,” said Harshita Rawat, a payments
analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein &
Co.
International money transfers especially are rife with inefficiencies, which Rawat said could make the area significantly well-suited for a cryptocurrency. Ultimately, she said, by “having people that have deep industry information around payments,” the social network is keeping its choices open for its money transfer ambitions.