Social media giant Facebook keeps looking to expand its blockchain-related staff.
Facebook’s careers website now lists 20 job openings related to the technology in a wide range of areas, including: technology communications director, threat investigator, data scientist, two product managers and a product designer, brand strategy and marketing managers, community, media and web manager, engineers, various UX researchers and other roles.
Probably the most unusual role is a global security strategic partner who “will serve as a liaison and thought partner between Global Security and the selected key business partners, in this case: Facebook’s Blockchain organization.”
The job descriptions don’t disclose much about any future product, but hint at ambitious goals:
“Our ultimate goal is to help billions of people with access to things they don’t have now – that could be things like healthcare, equitable financial services, or new ways to save or share information.”
Friending blockchain
Ahead of the current hiring spree, Facebook has been hinting at a keen interest in blockchain for some time.
According to a recent report by the New York Times, Facebook has been working on a token that will be used across the company’s media platforms, which include Facebook itself, WhatsApp and Instagram. The token will be a kind of a stablecoin pegged to a basket of several fiat currencies. Fifty engineers at the company are already working on the token and it’s expected to be released in the first half of 2019, the newspaper reported.
In a recently posted video interview with Harvard Law professor Jonathan Zittrain, Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg said blockchain technology might allow the company to re-imagine the way users sign on to the social media platform, replacing the current system called Facebook Connect.
“Basically, you take your information, you store it on some decentralized system and you have the choice to log into places without going through an intermediary,” Zuckerberg said.
Last summer, former PayPal president David Marcus stepped down from his board seat at crypto exchange Coinbase, citing his new assignment at Facebook as blockchain research lead – suggesting the social media company’s ambitions for the technology were serious enough to pose a conflict.
Facebook sign image via Shutterstock