David Marcus, the former president of PayPal and Vice President of Messenger, has announced that he is quitting as VP to head a new team as a part of Facebook’s pilot blockchain program.

The social media giant has been contemplating the use and integration of the blockchain technology into its environment for over a year now and in a very emotional message about moving forward and onwards, the VP of Messenger announced that Facebook has finally put together a team to do just that.

Trip Down Memory Lane

Messenger becoming a stand-alone app, separate from the Facebook interface, was the brainchild of Marcus and when he joined under 300 million users were using it. Over the last four years, those numbers have skyrocketed to over a billion.

Before joining Facebook in 2014, David Marcus was the president of online payment giant PayPal. Additionally, David Marcus also has an individual interest in the crypto space as just over the past couple of months he joined the board members at the American cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase.  

The significance of This Announcement

With the top giants industry-wide looking at blockchain alternatives for their day-to-day, the announcement Facebook is just another tick in the box. The blockchain is revolutionary technology and it is up to big names like Facebook and Google to lead the internet world into it.

The readiness to adopt the technology in other walks of the industry, rather than just the finance industry, in a way lends the technology a lot more credibility and shows it in a light that is separate from the highly tainted crypto industry. The blockchain, so far, has been subjected to a lot of criticism because of its obvious connection to the cryptocurrency market and as a technology has been quite neglected.

Meet the Team
Facebook’s experimental blockchain team has people coming in from all parts of the social media’s limbs. The team, for now, is going to be less than a dozen people led by David Marcus. As reported by Recode, the team includes Instagram’s VP Engineer and VP Product, James Everingham and Kevin Weil.

In their first company shake-up in 15 years, Facebook is bringing in the big guns for its first-ever blockchain experimental group and needless to say, big things are expected of the team.

Ramaa Mohan