More Than 100 People Work on Facebook’s Blockchain Project

As Facebook nears the public announcement of its highly secretive cryptocurrency project, the social media giant is looking to expand its blockchain team, with 40 new openings on top of the 100+ people already working on the project.

As reported by CNBC, several Facebook job postings said:

“The blockchain team is a startup within Facebook and we’re exploring lots of areas of interest across all facets of blockchain technology. Our ultimate goal is to help billions of people with access to things they don’t have now – that could be things like healthcare, equitable financial services, or new ways to save or share information.”

Many of the 40 open job positions are at Facebook’s headquarters in Menlo Park, California, and a handful of positions are at Facebook’s office in Tel Aviv, Israel.

Facebook’s Top Executives Leading Its Blockchain Project

Facebook’s head of blockchain is former PayPal president David Marcus, who also served on the board at Coinbase and sold his mobile payments startup Zong for $240 million in 2011. Marcus became Facebook’s head of blockchain in May 2018.

Another leading executive for Facebook’s blockchain division is Tomer Barel, VP of risk and operations. Barel also came from PayPal, and was brought into Facebook after Marcus was hired on. He previously spent 9 years at PayPal and is now with Facebook at their Tel Aviv office.

Yet another prominent Facebook executive is Kevin Weil, VP of product. Weil comes from Silicon Valley, spent 2 years as Instagram’s vice president of product, and before that 7 years climbing the ranks at Twitter. Now he’s joined Facebook’s blockchain project and is known for his product chops.

Other leading executives working on Facebook’s blockchain project include:

• James Everingham, head of engineering
• Geoff Teehan, head of product design
• Eric Nakagawa, head of open source
• Raaid Ahmad, head of analytics
• Govind Asawa, head of data engineering
• Oliver Gratry, head of finance
• Susan Portalupi, head of research
• Mandeep Walia, head of enterprise risk and compliance

All in all, Facebook has a stacked team of some of the most innovative and intelligent individuals in the tech industry. Facebook’s cryptocurrency is starting to look poised to disrupt the entire financial industry and bring a lot of new interest from governments, regulators, and consumers to the cryptocurrency space.

Do you think Facebook’s cryptocurrency will be heavily adopted very quickly? Let us know what you think in the comment section below.