Month: March 2019

What the New Facebook Coin Might Look Like

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The Facebook Coin Rumour

Twitter was rife with rumours about a new Facebook coin after The New York Times ran an article about the new secret coin that Facebook are working on along with Telegram and Signal who are also creating their own cryptocurrencies.

The Facebook coin will be used in its popular messaging app Whatsup which now has 1.5 billion users or roughly 20% of the entire planet’s population, assuming one user per person. Over 60 billion messages per day…. yes, per day!…. are sent by Facebook.

People are already musing about what the Facebook coin might look like:

Facebook’s new digital token is far enough along that they are talking to cryptocurrency exchanges about listing it, we heard. The current plan is for each coin to be pegged to a basket of foreign currencies, to keep the value stable. https://t.co/liup4kwoi8— Nathaniel Popper (@nathanielpopper) February 28, 2019

All these institutions creating their own coin (JP Morgan, Facebook)🤔 were the same companies to block Ads/ say negative comments on cryptocurrencies 🧐😅 love using this reference “ if you can’t beat em, join em” this tells you bitcoin is very much alive!!! 💯👀🗣 #Crypto $BTC— ℂ𝕣𝕪𝕡𝕥𝕠 𝕍𝕚𝕟𝕠 📈 (@Crypto_Vino) March 1, 2019

Facebook employees are telling these exchanges that they plan to get a working product out in the first half of 2019.

Facebook is looking at pegging the value of its coin to a basket of different foreign currencies, rather than just the dollar,” and that “Facebook could guarantee the value of the coin by backing every coin with a set number of dollars, euros and other national currencies held in Facebook bank accounts.”

What Might the Facebook Coin Look Like?

  • Borderless
  • Censorless, private… hopefully
  • Instant payments
  • Digital cryptocurrency “stablecoin” backed by a basket of real fiat currencies
  • Massive adoption on a scale never seen before with 1.5 billion users around the globe
  • Decentralised…. hopefully
  • Instant use case for app installs and game purchases
  • Perhaps a digital SDR, based on the value of five currencies; the U.S. dollar, the euro, the Chinese renminbi, the Japanese yen, and the British pound sterling. The SDR was created by the IMF (International Monetary Fund) in 1969 as an international reserve asset,

Let’s see if Facebook can achieve these where other cryptocurrencies have failed and will likely run into the same issues of its predecessors, namely government censorship, regulation and taxation. But, this gives massive creedence to the value of cryptocurrencies in today’s financial system, especially for micropayments and for the unbanked. If the government wants to go down the tax route and are smart about it, this could be a way for them to tax criminals, hackers and the unbanked.

Facebook Competitors

Facebook is hardly known for its privacy. Telegram & Signal are the most popular private messaging apps and they are also working on their own coins.

Telegram, which has an estimated 300 million users worldwide, is also working on a digital coin, the Gram Coin.

Signal, an encrypted messaging service that is popular among technologists and privacy advocates and has over 10 million users, has its own coin in the works, called MobileCoin and Binance has backed the coin with $30m of funding.

Kakao, with 43 million users in South Korea are also working on their own coin and are running an ICO to raise $300 million to create their cyptocurrency, Clay coin.

Line, with 600 million users registered in Japan is also working on its own coin. If you are a registered user in Japan, Thailand or Taiwaon you can even get FREE Line coins by installing certain apps. At the moment, three LINE-integrated apps, namely LINE Bubble!, LINE Dragon Flight and LINE I Love Coffee, are available through LINE Free Coins Click here for more.

Whatever the outcome, the future for cryptocurrencies just got a bit rosier.