Facebooks’s Crypto Token Might Be First Tested In India

By Prashant Jha

Facebook’s aspirational blockchain based payment system which would also see the social media giants launching their own crypto token might first get tested in India. The inner working group of Facebook Inc’s blockchain team is still maintaining secrecy over the progress of the project.

However, if reports are to be believed the blockchain team has already swelled up to 50 employees and the launch of the token might come way sooner than many have anticipated.  The stable coin which is being dubbed as project Libra is being speculated to be launched in India for its first phase of testing, where the users can send money in Stable coin to their friends and relatives for remittances via WhatsApp.

Some reports also confirmed that the social media giants are already testing their payment networks through WhatsApp pay and it might expand the services to other countries real soon. Recently, during the developer conference of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg said that the current blockchain centered payment project is part of Facebook’s vision that he is particularly excited about.

The Blockchain based stable coin project consists of several ex-PayPal employees and the earlier attempt by Facebook to integrate a payment portal in its messenger was also spearheaded by former PayPal president David Marcus who joined the Facebook group back in 2014. Marcus was responsible for creating a separate messenger app which boasts of 1 billion users as of today. He left messenger last year only to create a small group of data scientists who would look into leveraging blockchain across Facebook from scratch.

While Marcus led Messenger based payment system failed to climb the popularity charts, it for sure led the foundation stones for the current blockchain based payment system.

The plan of Facebook to test its stable coin in India is understandable given the fact that India accounts for a major share of Facebook daily users counting in hundreds of millions, and it is also the fastest growing online community in recent times.