“Facebookcoin” and other social media app tokens launching this year

In order to compete with Telegram, social media giant Facebook has been secretly working on their own cryptocurrency since last year and has gone so far as to market it to some crypto exchanges. All of the details are still unknown as the work is going on behind closed doors and the rumors are coming out from anonymous sources. If this works, and the jury is still out on that, it could launch crypto into the mainstream via the millions of users already on Facebook.

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Telegram has around 300 million users and has also been working on their own cryptocurrency since their private ICO last year. It turned out to be the biggest ICO ever for the Telegram Open Network, raising $1.7 billion, and it wasn’t even open to the public, but rather was released to private investors only. The idea these communication companies have is to provide a digital coin that their customers can use within the social media platform itself to send payments to each other. Considering that Facebook owns WhatsApp, Messenger and Instagram, their potential cryptocurrency could tap into hundreds of millions of people who use their platforms globally. Actually the figure is more like 2.7 billion monthly users in total to be more precise.

Other social media platforms are now also jumping on the bandwagon so as not to be left behind, like Korea’s “Kakao” and Japan’s “Line”, as well as the Russian-based Telegram service. A similar payment service has already proved popular within companies like Venmo in America and WeChat in China, who provide easy and efficient payment methods via mobile phone for their customers. So the marketing battle is on to develop a social media cryptocurrency that will allow cross-border money transfer, particularly to those “unbanked” without bank accounts in the developing world. Let’s see if they can get past the regulatory hurdles still in place that challenge all crypto projects trying to launch currently.

And Facebook is taking their challenge very seriously, last year hiring the former president of PayPal, David Marcus, to head up their crypto department, which now has over 50 engineers working behind closed doors and tight security to develop their token. Curiously the “’Facebookcoin”, if we can call it that for now, is apparently due to be pegged as a stable coin, not just to the dollar but to a basket of currencies. Imagine 2.7 billion, people who use at least one of the three apps owned by Facebook monthly, all suddenly having access to a cryptocurrency, even if it is a stable coin. Facebook themselves are worried about just how much control they will be able to maintain over this digital dragon once they have released it. All those transactions will need to be approved. Perhaps that’s why they want to get exchanges involved with them, who are set up for vetting customers more closely via KYC.

Rumors from the unnamed insider sources say that Facebook might even be ready to launch their stable coin in the first half of this year. The other messaging companies might not use a stable token concept and so their cryptocurrencies will probably have fluctuating values and be run on the blockchain with full decentralization and more user control, compared to Facebook. Certainly the Telegram token will really empower people in places like Iran and Russia who may be activists and have trouble accessing the traditional financial system. Massive sanctions on the two nations by America have curtailed their economies for many months now.

Telegram is apparently already 90% complete in efforts to launch its token called GRAM. It should be launched in the next few months. Another messaging company, Signal, is also working on their Mobilecoin for their app users, having raised $30 million last year and busy raising another $30 million at present. These companies all have strong privacy controls, and so are very popular among crypto enthusiasts, much more so than Facebook for example.

Nevertheless, this could be the year that social media and cryptocurrency unite and start a wave of adoption in the crypto industry that could help bring it into the mainstream once and for all.