Facebook Acquires Staff from Blockchain startup, Chainspace

Facebook has acquired senior staff from the blockchain startup, chainspace, according to first reports by Cheddar.

The acquisition reports seem to be mostly for the talent rather than a technology where four out of five researchers who authored Chainspace's academic paper will join Facebook's blockchain team. According to chainspace.io, its code and documentation will remain to be open source and previously published academic work will be also available.

Chainspace is working on blockchain technologies such as Sharded Byzantine Atomic Commit (S-BAC) protocol for internet-scale blockchains, leaderless consensus protocol called Blockmania, Fraud and data availability proofs for on-chain scaling, Coconut distributed threshold credential issuance to ensure confidentiality, authenticity, and availability etc. Chainspace's twitter handle describes itself as a decentralised infrastructure on a planetary scale; sharded, scalable, parallelizable smart contract blockchain platform.
In last December, Bloomberg reported that about possible remittance payments in India using Facebook's own cryptocurrency in India and can be utilized with WhatsApp messenger which is also owned by Facebook. In India, WhatsApp has more than 200 million users. The remittance to India stood at USD $80 billion at the end of 2018, according to the World Bank Report.

The social media giant is ramping up its efforts on blockchain with total 11 roles available for hire.