Some of the world’s biggest technology companies are entering into the cryptocurrency and blockchain space. Let’s look at some of them and see how it would affect bitcoin and the overall cryptocurrency and blockchain industry:
Twitter:
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey was on the Joe Rogan podcast this week talking about bitcoin as the money of the internet. What interesting about Jack Dorsey this week is that he admitted that he owns cryptocurrencies specifically bitcoin. This is not surprising considering that his cash app lets you send digital payments back and forth to people and lets you buy bitcoin so to see him only owning bitcoin is no real surprise. What’s more interesting is that Jack Dorsey took part in the lightning network torch relay which is something going around crypto twitter at the moment. Basically, people are sending bitcoin payments from one person to the next person adding a little more bitcoin on each time using the lightning network. He received that payment and send that payment ahead using the lightning network to Elizabeth Stark of lightning labs. To see this whole thing coming together like this is really encouraging. It’s really exciting to see the CEO of such a large tech company not only being a personal holder of bitcoin but also being very enthusiastic about the technology.
Facebook:
Facebook has acquired a company called ChainSpace which is a London based distributed ledger technology company. Facebook has been for a very long time expanding their overall approach to blockchain and Facebook has a lot of ways in which the blockchain technology could be very amazing for the company. Thinking about all the potential to improve privacy, security, monetization etc. The bottom line of Facebook could really be improved by blockchain technology. Estimates tell that they are around 60 people employed at Facebook specifically looking at blockchain technology. There was a piece of recent news about Facebook-owned Whatsapp will be releasing the Whatsapp coin. This is a very limited release to start with the only use case for people sending payments back and forth in India but it might expand over time to other countries as well if the initial trials go well. Acquiring ChainSpace is just the next step to that process for Facebook. Also interestingly there is a project called PledgeCamp and one of their key advisors is Randi Zuckerberg. There is although no announcement of any integration of Facebook with PledgeCamp but it does show that the people behind Facebook are looking at Blockchain startups and blockchain technology.
Google:
Google said this week that they are releasing a search engine tool that lets you search the eight top blockchains. They are also looking at how to bring all that data together, look at the metadata of it, understand what the best use cases are by looking at how actually the people are using blockchain today. It’s quite interesting to see Google spending a lot of time and effort focusing on that one area. Google also can increase their bottom line exponentially by using blockchain technology.
Telegram:
Telegram is finally getting to the point of launching their token. Telegram has prolonged suffered from a whole variety of different issues including scam accounts and all these different things but Telegram is taking this to the next step by launching their cryptocurrency. The in-app token will allow you to exchange value within the platform which would be really exciting to see.
Baidu:
Baidu, the Chinese internet giant is launching ZuperChain in the near future. Interesting to see that these Chinese tech giants are going forward with blockchain despite the government not liking cryptocurrency but they are not necessarily anti-blockchain.
Looking at all these giant companies getting into cryptocurrency and blockchain really exciting but all these giant companies bring a lot of their own set of troubles. Only a couple of weeks ago everyone was criticizing Jack Dorsey about censorship on Twitter. So we have to realize the limitations of these platforms. Twitter has the power to de-platform people and in certain cases, they do have to de-platform people and that’s the reality of Twitter. We cannot forget about the things that these big tech companies are doing just because they are now doing some positive things too. Facebook is the king of de-platforming and there is no indication that Facebook will magically start using bitcoin. So there is a double edge sword looking at these giant tech companies coming into the cryptocurrency and blockchain space because if there is a Facebook dollar would probably be very censorship pro. But regardless of the baggage that these giant tech companies bring along, the reality is that for a lot of people their first cryptocurrency experience may be because of one of these giant companies. So to see this happening is overall positive for the cryptocurrency economy.
What are your thoughts on these tech giants entering into the cryptocurrency and blockchain space? Tell us in the comments section below.
