Facebook denies Stellar rumours

Listen very carefully, they will say this only once…Facebook is not (repeat not) in talks with cryptocurrency venture Stellar (XLM), the social media giant has claimed.

“We are not engaged in any discussions with Stellar, and we are not considering building on their technology,” a spokesperson told Cheddar.

Exploring blockchain tech

On Friday, Facebook Vice President David Marcus stepped down from the board of Coinbase, citing a conflict of interest.

Earlier this year, it emerged that Marcus, the head of the company’s Messenger app, was fronting a “new internal team at Facebook dedicated to exploring blockchain technology”. Several Instagram executives were also linked with the initiative.

In a Coin Rivet comment piece, Guarang Torvekar, Co-Founder and CEO, Indorse, said: “While this is an unanticipated development, it shouldn’t come as a surprise to the community, considering several banks have been actively exploring blockchain technology over the last few years. When it started gaining mass adoption a few years ago, the entire premise centered on its ability to take away the power from centralised systems and institutions and give it back to users in a decentralised manner.”

“While there has been a lot of fuss surrounding the technology in preceding years, it hasn’t been able to keep up with the hype due to some major problems related to scalability. The fact that major companies like Facebook have started looking at it, begs the question — why?”

He added: “It is not entirely obvious at this point of time how Facebook might actually be using blockchain technology, and its plans for the future remains to be seen, but one thing is for certain. Facebook doesn’t want to miss out on the growing hype and the community adoption of the blockchain. They can definitely see huge potential and opportunity for this in the future and wouldn’t want to be left out, especially if one of the blockchain-based social networks becomes big and tries to dethrone Facebook from its current position as one of the market leaders.