The rumors about Facebook’s plans for acquiring Coinbase cryptocurrency exchange desk keep on spreading across the media. This information was first published by The Economist outlet, which noted the lack of Internet giants in the cryptospace.
Some experts believe that through buying Coinbase, the messenger would increase its value and utility, while also bringing more legitimacy to the cryptocurrency market and industry as a whole.
“It wouldn’t surprise me if Facebook made an attempt to acquire Coinbase. Whether [Coinbase CEO] Brian Armstrong and the team would agree is another question,” – tech entrepreneur Oliver Isaacs told The Independent.
Coinbase still has not come up with any comments on its possible acquisition by Facebook. As of Armstrong himself, he has previously voiced his company’s ambitions of seeing cryptocurrency adoption reach a billion people.
“Today we’re serving maybe 10 million customers,” he said in a promotional video for Coinbase in March. “We would like to reach a billion people in the world who are using digital currency on a daily basis.”
As of today, the number of Facebook users exceeds two billion. Thus, should the messenger decide to launch any cryptocurrency of its own, it will potentially have greater reach than any existing cryptocurrency, including Bitcoin.
“If platforms like Google, Twitter and Facebook launched their own cryptocurrency it could be huge because of the user base,” Phillip Nunn, CEO of Manchester-based investment firm Blackmore Group, told The Independent.
The Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg stated that he was “interested to go deeper” with looking into the blockchain technology and figure out “how best to use them” in combination with Facebook’s platform.
On June 27, Facebook reversed its ban on cryptocurrency-related advertisements. The company has also embarked on studying the opportunities of implementing blockchain. This research is led by David Marcus, who is the former head of Facebook Messenger and now the board member of Coinbase.