On Tuesday, Facebook (NASDAQ:FB) CEO Mark Zuckerberg put into motion a reorganization of his company that would put David Marcus—the head of the Messenger department—at the helm of an endeavor to research how the social network could integrate blockchain technology.
As part of this ambitious restructuring of the company, Marcus will no longer serve his role as Messenger’s chief, leaving Chris Cox to take the project into his hands alongside WhatsApp and Instagram.
“After nearly four unbelievably rewarding years leading Messenger, I have decided it was time for me to take on a new challenge. I’m setting up a small group to explore how to best leverage blockchain across Facebook, starting from scratch,” he said in a Facebook post.
By this statement, it’s quite possible that Facebook will embark on a journey to make its own proprietary blockchain backbone for certain services on the site. However, with the possibility to allow users to delete their content freely, it’s unclear exactly how the technology will be used on the user’s end.
Details are scant, but it’s likely that the blockchain experiments Facebook might try out would involve its advertising and content delivery infrastructure.
Although blockchains are generally immutable, it bears noting that they could theoretically be modified if more than half—or even all—of the systems inside the network agree with the change. This means that Facebook could still use blockchain technology for managing user posts and synchronizing them across a vast network of datacenters.
Because blocks don’t have to be mined like they would in cryptocurrencies, most posts would show up in real time just like they do now.
However, since Facebook processes about three million posts per minute, whatever backbone the platform decides to use will have to deal with these monolithic volumes impeccably.
By taking blockchain technology this seriously, Mark Zuckerberg is making good on his word after he wrote about it being one of his goals for the company he runs at the beginning of the year.
This article appeared first on Cryptovest
