Facebook may want to enter the cryptographic currency market. The social network is considering launching its own stablecoin and designing it for use within WhatsApp. The intention would be to put the coin into use in India first.
That’s what financial press agency Bloomberg reports today based on sources familiar with the matter. Stablecoin basically offers the advantages of a crypto currency. This makes it possible to trade them digitally. But the enormous price fluctuations we know from various tokens are missing. This is because a stablecoin is linked to another value, usually the US dollar.
Just a little while longer
Facebook wouldn’t be ready to release the stablecoin yet. The company is still looking for a way to do this properly and is currently calculating the amount it needs to keep in reserve in order to be able to guarantee the value of the currency. The fact that Facebook is currently looking at blockchain is not very strange, although it is somehow ironic that the social network decided in January to ban advertising around cryptic currency. Last June it partly came back to that.
The fact that a blockchain team was set up within Facebook in May already pointed out that the company is interested in the technology in any case. Under the leadership of Chris Coxs Platforms and Infrastructure team, the network is currently looking into this. This team is also responsible for the development of apps, including WhatsApp. Maybe that’s where the combination comes from.
WhatsApp was acquired by Facebook in 2014 for 19 billion dollars. It is one of the most popular messaging platforms in the world, with an estimated 1.5 billion users. In countries like India, the apps are also extremely popular and banks are not as widely available as in other parts of the world. There, a stablecoin for payments is potentially very interesting.
This news article was automatically translated from Dutch to give Techzine.eu a head start. All news articles after September 1, 2019 are written in native English and NOT translated. All our background stories are written in native English as well. For more information read our launch article.