By Chris Skinner via Iris.xyz
I got a large number of pings over the weekend to read and comment on an article on Medium by Lance Ng headlined: Facebook Plans to Become World’s Biggest Central Bank?
It is a conjectured article that takes the story from The New York Times discussing Facebook creating its own cryptocurrency (Facebook and Telegram Are Hoping to Succeed Where Bitcoin Failed).
The NYT article is co-written by Nathaniel Popper, the author of Digital Gold: The Untold Story of Bitcoin, and discusses how building cryptocurrency into WhatsApp and other services could make digital currencies go global.
The most anticipated but secretive project is underway at Facebook. The company is working on a coin that users of WhatsApp, which Facebook owns, could send to friends and family instantly, said five people briefed on the effort who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of confidentiality agreements. The Facebook project is far enough along that the social networking giant has held conversations with cryptocurrency exchanges about selling the Facebook coin to consumers, said four people briefed on the negotiations …
Facebook has more than 50 engineers working on its project, three people familiar with the effort said. An industry website, The Block, has been keeping track of the steady flow of new job listings for the Facebook project. The Facebook effort, which is being run by a former president of PayPal, David Marcus, started last year …
Click here to read more on Iris.
