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Editor | Lu Xiaoming
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According to reports, people familiar with the matter revealed that although the internal work of the Facebook blockchain team remains confidential, it is currently expanding its staff and has hired several former PayPal employees to participate in the project. Its product, which could be a stablecoin, could launch as early as next quarter, the people said.
According to Facebook insiders, the blockchain group is developing a stablecoin anchored to the US dollar or a basket of currencies to reduce the possibility of price volatility. It is reported that the first test of this stable currency is in India. India has a strong attraction for Facebook. Facebook believes that India has huge room for expansion in the payment field.
Facebook's blockchain unit was launched in May 2018 and currently has 50 employees. About one-fifth of those employees worked for PayPal Holdings Inc. David Marcus, an executive who was in charge of Messenger, Facebook's standalone instant messaging app, stepped down from that role to lead the blockchain division. The newly formed blockchain department of Facebook belongs to one of the three newly established groups of Facebook - "New Platform and Architecture Group". The group is headed by Facebook CTO Mike Schroepfer. Facebook's augmented reality, virtual reality and artificial intelligence teams will all be folded into the unit.
Marcus left PayPal in 2014 to join Facebook as product lead for Messenger, Facebook's instant messaging app. Moreover, he led the team to achieve early profitability on Messenger, making Facebook's instant messaging service grow into a profitable independent business, and the number of Messenger users currently exceeds 1 billion. Marcus also launched an AI assistant app called M. In May 2018, he left Messenger, announcing in a statement that he was "building a group to explore how best to leverage blockchain technology at Facebook, starting from scratch."
Soon, Marcus brought some old PayPal employees to join Facebook's blockchain group. Marcus initially hired Christina Smedley, who will play a key role in the marketing and promotion of Facebook's eventual blockchain product, according to these people. Earlier, Smedley was hired by Marcus to PayPal as Vice President of Global Brand and Communications, and later joined Facebook Messenger.
As a longtime publicist for Amazon.com Inc. and public relations firm Edelman, Smedley's main task has been to convince people of Facebook's financial prowess, despite Facebook's recent privacy and public relations crises and concerns about Cryptocurrencies are also generally skeptical.
Early members of the Facebook blockchain team also include Tomer Barel, who has worked on risk monitoring and fraud at PayPal for ten years, and John Muller, who has worked at PayPal and EBay for nearly 20 years. According to people familiar with the matter, John Muller will serve as the general counsel of Facebook Group.
The "PayPal Mafia" (English: PayPal Mafia) refers to a group of former PayPal employees who later developed or founded other technology companies. Their success rate of re-starting businesses after leaving PayPal is impressive, and the companies they have built include Tesla Motors, LinkedIn, Matterport, Palantir Technologies, SpaceX, YouTube, Yelp and Yammer2. Most members attended Stanford University or the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Three of its members, including Peter Thiel, Elon Musk and Reed Hoffman, became billionaires.
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Now, many people comment that Facebook's blockchain department is about to recreate the myth of the "PayPal Mafia". There are many technical masters in this department, including Meron Colbeci, who worked with Marcus as the director of the product group at PayPal, and Nate Gonzalez , held an important position in PayPal's global peer-to-peer payment department, and Colbeci and Smedley also helped Facebook's blockchain department recruit in October 2018.Readers who want to know more about the Paypal gang are welcome to read
