Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has made it his personal challenge for 2018 to fix Facebook. He said that he’s interested to go deeper and study the positive and negative aspects of technologies like cryptocurrency but don’t expect Facebook to embrace digital currencies in the near future. Facebook Messenger chief David Marcus has revealed two key reasons why the social network is staying away from cryptocurrencies right now.
Facebook’s VP of Messaging David Marcus recently joined Coinbase’s board, it’s a major digital currency exchange, and while some might have felt that this was an indication that perhaps we might see bitcoin being added as a payment method on Facebook, that couldn’t be further from the truth.
Speaking to CNBC, Marcus said that “Payments using crypto right now is just very expensive, super slow, so the various communities running the different blockchains and the different assets need to fix all the issues,” adding that it’s only once these issues are resolved someday, “maybe we’ll do something.”
Marcus has long been interested in cryptocurrencies and happens to have a solid background in digital payments. He sold his mobile payments company Zong to PayPal many years ago before joining Facebook to run its messaging division.
He also commented on Facebook’s recent decision to ban all ads related to ICOs and cryptocurrencies on its social network. “We want to protect the community. That’s job number one. All the legitimate people in the crypto world that I spoke to at least thanked me for what we just did with that move,” he said, pointing out that the vast majority of these ads were a scam and Facebook can’t allow scams to exist on its platform.