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David Marcus, vice president of Messaging Products at Facebook, speaks at Facebook's annual F8 developer conference in San Jose, California on April 18, 2017.
Stephen Lam | Reuters
Facebook will announce its cryptocurrency later this month and will allow employees working on the project to take their pay in the form of the new currency, according to a report in The Information.
About a year ago, the company appointed David Marcus, a former CEO of PayPal, to explore the possibilities offered by Blockchain, the cryptocurrency technology support. Since then, several outlets have announced that the company is building its own digital currency, which users will be able to store, exchange and exchange for ordinary currency, in part via Facebook applications, including Messenger and WhatsApp. The report adds that Facebook also provides ATM-type physical machines where users can use the currency.
Creating a simple way for more than 2 billion Facebook users to pay for their purchases and exchange money between countries could help the company to diversify beyond advertising, which today accounts for almost all of its income. Facebook's advertising model has been criticized by privacy advocates, lawmakers and the press for the way they collect and use detailed information about users.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg pointed out that payments were an important area for the company at its developer conference earlier this year. However, Sheryl Sandberg, chief of operations, and David Wehner, chief financial officer, were "skeptical about the initiative internally," said The Information.
The report says that Facebook is asking third-party organizations to act as "nodes" to help manage cryptocurrency, and discussed charging a $ 10 million lien.
Cryptocurrency nodes contain the computing power needed to solve complex mathematical equations, used to validate transactions. They are usually decentralized and distributed among thousands of parties, but Facebook is currently creating a foundation with named partners to help manage its currency, the report says.
A spokesman for Facebook declined to comment.
The full report is available to The Information subscribers here.
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