[Deep Chain Original]

Text丨doorman

In the first 6 months of working on the blockchain, everyone was very confused

In June 2018, Facebook really started to work on the blockchain, and at that time the blockchain department was established.

When it was said that the blockchain department was to be established, many people were very interested. They wrote a lot of documents, brainstormed, and discussed that the blockchain could do this and that, but it was just a fantasy, because in the end It's up to the executives to decide.

The executive in charge of this division is David Marcus, the president of PayPal and a member of the board of directors of cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase, who joined Facebook in 2014.

David Marcus is the kind of sheep-herding management style, only talking but not doing. He found Instagram's vice president of engineering, James Everingham, and vice president of product, Kevin Weil, who are his right-hand men.

Although Zuckerberg proposed to explore the direction of the blockchain, but for at least six months, everyone was very confused and didn't know what to do.

The company has many bottom-end architecture engineers, but they don't know what a blockchain is, and everyone is still in the state of reading white papers, reading papers, and doing tests.

At that time, the company planned to recruit 100 people, 50 engineers, and the rest were product and legal personnel. But it was very difficult to recruit people at that time.

If recruited from the inside, people who understand the blockchain will go out to issue coins, because it is a bull market, it is really too easy to issue coins to make money. People who don't understand, you recruit them and they won't stay for a long time, because there was no goal or plan for this matter at the time.

However, some insiders feel very good about themselves, "We are Facebook, and what we make must be better than others."

There is also a CTO in this group, Ben Maurer, the co-founder of Google's human-machine verification (reCaptcha), he is the highest-level code farmer at Facebook, and he has read the entire blockchain architecture.

I talked with him before I left the company. He was also asking which public chain is better. I know they really want to build their own public chain. Facebook also talked to Hashgraph and Cosmos before.

A few days ago, I met with people in the blockchain department and learned that Facebook will not use any existing public chains, and they are developing their own architecture.

This structure may be related to the structure and research of ChainSpace previously acquired by Facebook.

Another problem is that to do cutting-edge things like blockchain, the people recruited by Facebook are too high-level and the level is too high. Each of them has their own ideas. Of course, I believe that they will be able to figure out what to do in the future, but this process will inevitably require a lot of adjustments.

About 50 engineers in the blockchain department

In the matter of making stablecoins, in fact, the cake was not that big at first.

Facebook has a C2C sales function, Facebook Marketplace, which was launched by Facebook on the mobile terminal in 2016. After users find their favorite products on the platform, they can directly buy them on Facebook, without jumping from social media to shopping websites.

In December last year, people in the blockchain department considered applying the blockchain to the Marketplace. Perhaps because it was related to transaction payments, they began to consider whether they could create a stable currency.

So if you want to make a stable currency, can you make the pie bigger and make cross-border payments.

When the outside world sees that Facebook is going to make a stable currency, the first reaction is to make cross-border payments. In fact, Facebook didn’t have this idea at first, because everyone didn’t know what the blockchain can do. Later research found that it seems that transfers and payments are more reliable.

This is the source of Facebook's idea of ​​making a stable currency.

Facebook's cross-border payment is actually very imaginative.

Although there are already many stablecoins on the market, even the USDT with the largest number of users is only more than 10 billion US dollars. If Facebook makes a stablecoin, it can completely kill any current stablecoin, so Facebook does not use other stablecoins at all. Put it in your eyes.

In addition, although Facebook is just a social network, it is a completely different track from traditional banks and financial institutions, but it may seize their market and shake their position through stablecoins, because you do not know the social network How big will the impact be.

Just like 10 years ago, no one would have imagined that a retail giant like Wal-Mart would be gradually subverted by an Internet company like Amazon. The industries and tracks that were completely unrelated to each other have now produced conflicts, competition and annexation.

However, even if it is decided to be a stable currency, I think they may not have figured it out yet. Facebook already has the payment function. What can the blockchain provide for payment? What can offer more? Where is its added social value?

In addition, the bank that is bound to be involved in the payment, if I transfer the stable currency to you, how do you exchange it into the local legal currency? This is not a technical issue, but a legal and compliance issue.

Of course, you can also see that Facebook actually considers compliance issues, and they have recruited a lot of legal counsel.

At present, the total number of people in the blockchain department is 150 to 200, but there are only 50 or 60 engineers, and the rest are all products, scientific research and legal affairs.

You may say that it takes 7 to 10 days for cross-border transfers, which is relatively slow, but the speed through blockchain and stable coins will be very fast. But the premise of this matter is that you have to trust Facebook.

Facebook is actually facing a crisis of trust due to the leakage of user privacy. The blockchain can solve this problem to a certain extent. They are actually exploring the boundaries of the "transparency" that the blockchain can bring to users.

But even if you use blockchain technology, how much you can solve the crisis of trust and how many people are willing to trust you are actually issues that Facebook has to solve.

According to my estimation, Facebook is about to issue coins by the end of this year, but in the end whether this stable coin can really be "made" is still a question mark.

Facebook isn't taking blockchain that seriously

Since Facebook started to build a blockchain, everyone in the circle began to pay attention. After the New York Times reported some time ago, the domestic attention was a little hot, and some media even reported that Facebook strategically transferred the blockchain. chain.

Of course, this is also understandable. After all, the blockchain is still a small circle. Big companies like JPMorgan Chase, Facebook, and IBM pay attention to the blockchain. There is nothing wrong with it.

However, we really need to look at it rationally and calmly, and I may even pour some cold water on everyone-Facebook does not pay as much attention to the blockchain as everyone thinks.

Facebook has always been a very innovative company. It can be said that among technology companies including Google and Amazon, Facebook's innovation ability is definitely the strongest. Every year and every quarter, we will hold an internal hackathon, and you can try various innovations internally.

Therefore, when a new technology such as blockchain gets attention, Facebook will inevitably make related attempts, which is the company's culture.

In addition, when Zuckerberg said to explore the direction of the blockchain, I think he may not have thought clearly at that time, but the matter of privacy leakage was really a headache at that time, so he said, we should go in this direction Research, just to mention a sentence.

But what the blockchain can bring to Facebook, in fact, they don't know.

In addition, although the blockchain department was established, it does not have such an important position in the entire Facebook.

There is a group within Facebook in Building 8 (Building 8), which specializes in technology. It is very mysterious and no one knows where it is. I have a few friends in it, and what they do is very confidential, and it may be the direction of development for the next 10 years. But this kind of department is not a core department, let alone a blockchain department.

Blockchain, an experimental product, simply won't be the company's focus until it can really prove itself of great use to Facebook.

If Facebook has a core department, there is only one, and that is the advertising department.

Zuckerberg never said that blockchain is the future direction of development. He only said that privacy is very important, and he would not say that blockchain can solve privacy problems. This is just the imagination of the outside world.

In addition, Zuckerberg has too many things to do. Recently, their CPO has left, and the founders and executives of Instagram and WhatsApp have all left. With so many important things to manage, do you think Zuckerberg will Focus on the blockchain?

This article is original for Deepchain (ID: deepchainvip). Unauthorized reprinting is prohibited.

This article is original for Deepchain (ID: deepchainvip). Unauthorized reprinting is prohibited.