- Mark Zuckerberg to Study Cryptocurrency Technology
Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg on Thursday expressed his interest in cryptocurrency technology and its potential usage in strengthening Facebook services going forward.
In the 2018 mission statement, Zuckerberg emphasized the limitation of centralized technologies, while at the same time highlighting the danger of unregulated decentralized technologies.
“With the rise of a small number of big tech companies — and governments using technology to watch their citizens — many people now believe technology only centralizes power rather than decentralizes it,” he stated.
“There are important counter-trends to this –like encryption and cryptocurrency — that take power from centralized systems and put it back into people’s hands. But they come with the risk of being harder to control. I’m interested to go deeper and study the positive and negative aspects of these technologies, and how best to use them in our services.”
While Zuckerberg mentioned blockchain as an example of technology that decentralizes power, the concept, if materialized could also help Facebook catch up with Asian messaging competitors on mobile payment solution.
For instance, Alipay and WeChat Pay control an estimated 92 percent of the 500 million mobile payment users in China, while beggars in some Chinese cities are already accepting mobile payments to their accounts using QR codes.
With cash becoming obsolete and Facebook payment struggling to fully kick off, this could help the social media giant capitalize on growing blockchain technology to further its reach in developed nations with an estimated 556 million mobile payment users.
Mark Højgaard, the CEO and co-founder of Coinify, a tech company helping businesses accept payments via crypto, said: “It definitely makes sense for Facebook users globally to send some kind of token to each other. This could be currency or something else like points that you can redeem them for things within the Facebook ecosystem, like premium content.”
The social media giant at F8 developer conference said it plans to expand its mobile payment solution to include bill payments and investing options, something WeChat Pay and Alipay have been offering for years.