Facebook set to hire five new blockchain staff

Facebook is stepping up its emphasis on blockchain technology by posting five blockchain job listings on LinkedIn.

The social media titan now has a total of 25 job listings for blockchain specialists, with the new advert requesting a production manager, business operations manager, data scientist, software engineer, and growth product manager.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has shown a keen interest in blockchain technology since the turn of the year, discussing it at length in a video interview with Harvard Law professor Jonathan Zittrain.

“A use of blockchain that I’ve been thinking about, though I haven’t figured out a way to make this work out, is around authentication and granting access to your information to different services,” he said.

“So, replacing the notion of what we have with Facebook Connect with something that is truly distributed.”

There has also been speculation over whether Facebook will adopt its own cryptocurrency, with the New York Times reporting that “Facebook may succeed where Bitcoin has failed.”

Although Zuckerberg spoke optimistically of the technology in the video interview, he has concerns about the efficiency of a distributed ledger and the high computational output.

“Certainly the level of computation that Facebook is doing is really intense to do in a distributed way,” he added.

“Decentralised things that are computationally intensive will be harder. They’re harder to do computation on, but eventually, maybe you have the resources to do that.”

For more news, guides, and cryptocurrency analysis, click here.