Facebook, the social media giant, intends to develop its own stablecoin for money transfers, according to a Bloomberg report. In this respect, the company will initially focus on the Indian market to allow customers of the messaging application WhatsApp to transfer money in the form of a fiat-pegged cryptocurrency, which Facebook acquired in 2014.
The report added, however, that the actual introduction of the stablecoin could still take a lot of time, as the initiative is at a strategic planning stage. WhatsApp currently has more than 200 million active users per month in India.
India is also one of the biggest remittance markets, with migrants transferring $69.59 billion home in 2017 alone, according to the World Bank’s most recent annual report.
In May, Facebook assembled its blockchain team to study recent technologies. It posted five job openings in early December to add additional members with proficiency in data science, software engineering and marketing to its blockchain team.
David Marcus, formerly vice president of the Messenger App division of Facebook, heads the blockchain team. In June, Evan Cheng, a senior engineer, was appointed as his first blockchain engineering director by the firm.
Anthony Pompliano, a crypto analyst and founder and partner at Morgan Creek Digital Assets, tweeted “If Facebook launches the stablecoin they are reportedly building, it will quickly become the most used product in crypto. The Indian government has been fighting crypto too so things are about to get very, very interesting.”
In the meantime, other global messaging applications, such as Kakao, LINE and Telegram, have already shown plans for moving into the blockchain arena. In August, Japan’s LINE was one of the first publicly traded companies to launch its own own blockchain mainnet with a native crypto called the LINK token.
