This article comes fromHackernoon, Original Author: Muhammad Ahsan Khan
Odaily Translator |
Odaily Translator |
Interestingly, Facebook has tried to integrate the payment system into its platform many times before to provide financial services to its users, but every move they have made has ended in failure, and it is a "complete" failure So much so that we don't even remember the painful lessons they had.
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Facebook has a really long history of failures in the payments industry...
In fact, Mark Zuckerberg seems to have had no success in the payment industry, believe it? Let Mr. Odaily (WeChat: o-daily) show you his failure history first.
1. Facebook Credits: This may be the first so-called "virtual currency" product launched by Facebook. This product was launched in 2011. At the beginning, it hoped to simplify the payment transactions related to virtual goods on the management platform, and will start from A 30% fee is charged on each transaction. But what people didn't expect was that due to exchange rate fluctuations and other issues, the Facebook Credits product caused a lot of trouble for international payments, and was finally eliminated in 2013.
2. Facebook Gifts: Facebook Gifts was launched in 2012, but like Facebook Credits, it only survived for two short years. According to social product analyst Josh Constine, Facebook Credits failed to succeed largely because Facebook never figured out how to address the distance and localization issues that kept the product from working internationally.
3. Facebook Messenger Payments: In 2015, Facebook launched the "Payment Transfer" function on its instant messaging application Messenger, but this function is limited to friends. Some are similar to WeChat transfers, which require binding bank cards and setting up transactions at the same time. password. Although Facebook Messenger Payments expanded to the European market in 2015, we must all know what its status quo looks like-it has not been widely used at all.
On the other hand, Telegram in the encryption industry is enough for Facebook to deal with it for a while. The Telegram founders have raised more than $1 billion through an initial coin offering (ICO) last year, and a beta version of its blockchain platform, TON, will soon be available.
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The question is, if Facebook did launch a stablecoin this time, what would be the difference?
However, on the payment track, although Facebook has experienced so many failures, they still have not given up, especially when Mark Zuckerberg knew the blockchain technology, and once again ignited his almost extinguished passion. Pay for the Fire of Wishes.According to the analysis of industry insiders, "Facebook Coin" may be similar to the JPM Coin (JPM Coin) launched by JPMorgan Chase, and it is not a type of cryptocurrency like Bitcoin or Ethereum, soIt is more like a centralized internal digital currency
In fact, Facebook didn't take the issue seriously, they really just wanted to clone a stablecoin, which is obviously not how it works in the cryptocurrency world. The reason why cryptocurrencies can be popularized and applied around the world is mainly because of its concept of decentralization - take Bitcoin as an example, its network does not have a real "owner".
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Will Facebook Coin or WhatsApp Coin be first applied in e-commerce?In addition, according to the previous"New York Times"
At this stage, Facebook’s encryption project is operating in a very secret way, and even internal employees don’t know too many details, but judging from the information disclosed by some insiders, Facebook Coin or WhatsApp Coin is probably not a real “crypto coin” in the true sense. Cryptocurrency”, but a simple imitation of stable currency, which is also contrary to the true decentralized Satoshi vision and P2P payment. Frankly speaking, Mark Zuckerberg's idea of building an encrypted world is likely to be a "false proposition". It is just a public gimmick for Facebook to evade privacy issues. People are also full of doubts about Facebook's user privacy protection.
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Could a Private Stablecoin Solve Facebook's Payments Problem?Before the Civil War, there were more than 8,000 currencies in circulation in the United States, but today there are only more than 2,000 cryptocurrencies.
Tokenization means that assets are being transferred to the blockchain, or rely on the blockchain to issue digital assets. However, if an internal token is issued in a hurry without careful consideration, Facebook may completely destroy the good vision of the cryptocurrency industry. destroy.
Today, everyone is exploring blockchain solutions: Telegram and Signal plan to launch cryptocurrencies next year, and Square wants to integrate the Bitcoin Lightning Network, deploying the most innovative and scalable new technology. However, Facebook does not seem to understand cryptocurrencies.
Until now, WhatsApp has still not achieved profitability, and digital currency may not be the answer to Zuckerberg’s problem. One of the reasons is that when trying to deploy cryptocurrency solutions, Facebook did not innovate, but cloned and copied. Moreover, the market should still be a little skeptical about Facebook/WhatsApp Coin-sending messages to friends and family at any time is undoubtedly an easy thing for WhatsApp. But what about money transfers? In any case, people probably trust a bank like JPMorgan Chase more than Facebook to be able to handle real-time transfers.
Facebook owns a series of applications, such as Facebook Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp, and users are constantly switching between these applications, and it is impossible to concentrate. Now, Zuckerberg now hopes to use encryption to integrate Facebook Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp, but if Facebook really wants to launch their cryptocurrency project, it must upgrade its messaging infrastructure, and this This transformation and integration work may take at least a year or more to cover Facebook's digital currency to all 2.7 billion users. Regardless of the cumbersome infrastructure transformation, when it comes to financial security, Facebook has to track every transaction of every user. As a "centralized" enterprise, Facebook's adoption of a decentralized solution will make transaction processing more difficult. The efficiency becomes lower, and it will be better to use a traditional centralized processing system like PayPal.
