Facebook Blockchain Team Recruits Two Ex-Coinbase Compliance Managers, Is FB Coin Inevitable?

Facebook, the most popular social media platform in the world with subsidiaries including WhatsApp Inc. and Instagram, has hired two of Coinbase’s former compliance managers. Both gentlemen who were hired this month each spent a few years with Coinbase before leaving and joining Facebook. These moves made by Facebook are said to be a part of the social media giant’s efforts towards one or more blockchain projects.

Facebook’s New Managers

After spending almost five years with Coinbase, Jeff Cartwright left the cryptocurrency exchange sometime in March where he worked in compliance. For now, all the information about his job description publicly known is that he is a Policy and Compliance Manager.

Facebook is rumored to be working on a project that will see the firm creating a new stablecoin. However, at this time, Facebook has not acknowledged any part of this and Cartwright himself hasn’t been forthcoming about the specifics of his new role.

Cartwright is a trained lawyer and before joining Coinbase, he was also a compliance staff with American Express and also at Goldman Sachs. Cartwright has also served as an anti-money-laundering consultant at KPMG – one of the largest professional financial services firms in the world. Jeff Cartwright on joining Coinbase was initially the firm’s manager for anti-money-laundering and Bank Secrecy Act (BSA) compliance. In 2017, he became the head of Internal Audit and then became a Director of Regulatory Risk and Exams, late last year.

The other new employee is Mikheil Moucharrafie. Mikheil spent four years at Coinbase and has also joined Facebook as a compliance staff. Also, just like Cartwright, Mikheil’s LinkedIn page specifically says he’s Compliance Officer at Facebook but says nothing more.

Facebook’s Proposed Stablecoin

It is expected that the new additions to the Facebook team might just be for the cryptocurrency project the social media heavyweight is currently undertaking. Facebook has successfully kept most of its plans under wraps and apart from the fact that the coin will be called Libra, not much else is known about the coin or all the efforts towards its actualization.

Recently, in an open letter from the U.S. Senate Banking Committee, founder and CEO – Mark Zuckerberg – was asked to disclose particulars about the upcoming project with specific attention to privacy about individual financial information.

For a while now, Facebook has silently been recruiting a team of experienced players to work on blockchain technology research, presumably for Libra. The team, it is rumored, will not have more than twelve people and is already been led by David Marcus, who used to be on the Coinbase board.

Also, unverified comments about the project say that Facebook is seeking support from venture capitalists to the tune of about $1 billion as backing for Libra.