According to CCN news, Facebook appointed senior engineer Evan Cheng as the engineering director of the blockchain department. According to his LinkedIn page, Cheng started working at Facebook since November 2015 and has been working in Facebook’s programming language and operations department. It is worth mentioning that before he took office, a large number of senior technical staff in Facebook’s blockchain department were resigned.
At the beginning of May 2018, Facebook formed a blockchain department, which was led by David Marcus, to explore the application of blockchain technology on the Facebook platform. David Marcus was a member of the board of directors of Coinbase and the former president of PayPal. There were about dozens of people in this department. Recently, Libra, a cryptocurrency project launched by Facebook, has been renamed to Diem in order to seek regulatory approval by emphasizing the independence of the project. Stuart Levey, CEO of Diem Association, said that the name change was to reflect a simpler and more complete structure. The goal now is to launch a stable digital currency backed by the US dollar. In May 2020, Facebook changed its payment unit Calibra to Novi Financial.
It was reported that due to the road to success of the Facebook blockchain was so difficult, some main players in the technical team were unsatisfied. The launch of stablecoins does not require high technical requirements, thus a large number of technical personnel has left. The mysterious LIBRA-I team began to loom in the blockchain arena like the Bitcoin Core that maintained Bitcoin. Because it is an anonymous team, some experts believed that the founder of the Libra-i team came from Facebook’s Libra, and through Libra-i, bypassing the government control of a certain country, to develop virtual currencies that are not limited to stable currencies.
