Tech giants are exploring blockchain and Facebook will not be far behind. The company has reportedly promoted one of its senior engineers, Evan Cheng, as Director of Engineering for its new blockchain division.
Driving the blockchain divide
Last May, Facebook Messenger boss David Marcus announced that he was stepping down to help the company explore the uses of blockchain technology.
“I’m creating a small group to explore how to best leverage Blockchain on Facebook, starting from scratch,” Marcus announced via a post on his Facebook page. This came months after Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s announcement that he had begun exploring potential uses of cryptocurrencies for Facebook. Blockchain turns out to be the underlying technology behind the cryptocurrencies made famous by Bitcoin.
Joining Marcus is now another senior Facebook engineer.
Taking blockchain seriously
Now that one of its lead engineers has transferred to the blockchain division, the social media giant seems more serious than ever. Evan Cheng’s LinkedIn profile supports his transfer as he recently became the Director of Blockchain Engineering. Previously, Cheng was known as director of programming languages and runtimes at Facebook. He had held the position for three years.
Before that, Cheng was at Apple and worked as a senior manager of low-level tools. He also has background in post engineering and build technology. Cheng’s history showed him tweeting about blockchain. Additionally, he previously served as a splitter for various blockchain companies/projects such as ChainLink and Zilliqa.
“It means it’s [Cheng’s promotion] not just an exploratory project,” TechCrunch quoted a source that monitors the blockchain space. According to the same source, putting Cheng in the blockchain division means the project is important because he knows a thing or two about scalability and performance.
As of Q1 2018, Facebook has more than 2 billion monthly active users worldwide, making it a likely target for security threats because of the vast amount of valuable information it currently holds. In recent news, the company has been involved in different data breach scandals in which data from 87 million Facebook users was collected and used in political campaigns. Despite this, the number of monthly users increased by 13 percent compared to the first quarter of 2017. Seeing the significant impact of social networks in today’s society, it is about time that Facebook and similar social networking sites find ways to protect their users from unscrupulous manipulation.
Facebook’s move to explore blockchain may be one of the steps to address these issues. With the decentralized and immutable design of blockchain, it bodes well for streamlining processes and strengthening security for data handling in many industries.