Zuckerberg Takes Interest In Cryptocurrency – Can It Improve Facebook?

Mark Zuckerberg recently announced in a Facebook post that he has taken a keen interest in crypto coins. He said in the post that one of his pursuits in 2018 would be to understand crypto coins.

The statement mainly discussed how Zuckerberg was taking on personal challenges for 2018. The main challenge for him this year will be to fix Facebook. In 2017, his main challenge was to visit all the states he had never been to and meeting people.

Besides fixing Facebook, Zuckerberg has a number of other key issues that he wants to fix in 2018. To achieve this, he intends to bring together groups of experts to create solutions for these issues.

However, it is worth noting that the co-founder of Facebook only mentioned cryptocurrency in passing as one of the technologies that allow decentralization of power. However, he said that the concept behind the technology could assist Facebook to compete with Asian rivals in the mobile payments sector.

For instance, it is quite easy to pay for products and services using AliPay and WeChat. In fact, these two apps are almost making cash obsolete. Even beggars have adopted the technology, instead of asking for spare change, they seek mobile payment using QR codes.

In China, both Alibaba and WeChat hold about 92 percent of the market for mobile Wallets. This is quite huge when you think about the size of China. There are about 500 million users of mobile wallets, which is more than the entire US population. The rest of the world has about 556 million users of mobile money accounts according to recent research.

Facebook Payment Option Has Not Taken Off

Despite having promising potential, the Facebook payment features have yet to take off. Via Facebook, users are able to link their Messenger account to a debit card. They can then use this feature to make fast and easy payment or make purchases via Marketplace on Facebook or Messenger.

Facebook has indicated at past developer conferences that it intends to cautiously expand its payment platform. This will include investing options and bill payment, which are services that Alipay and WeChat already offer.

According to the founder of Coinify, a company helping businesses accept crypto payments, it would make sense for Facebook users to be able to send tokens to each other. This could be redeemed for things such as premium content within Facebook.

In China, the government has already banned ICOs and forced domestic crypto exchanges to close. Thus, Facebook could get an early lead on its competitors if it moves fast to create a crypto wallet or even a Facebook coin.

What Zuckerberg Said

On the issue of crypto coins Zuckerberg said “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…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.”