Facebook developing cryptocurrency for WhatsApp: Bloomberg

With the rise and fall of Bitcoin dominating many headlines, it was a matter of time before Bitcoin entered the mainstream.

According to Bloomberg, social media giant Facebook is working to make a cryptocurrency that will allow users to transfer money on WhatsApp.

The focus would first be on the Indian market as the company develops a ''stablecoin'' - a type of digital currency that is attached to the US dollar. Facebook-owned WhatsApp is popular in India with more than 200 million users.



Facebook is far at the moment from releasing the coin, but the team has begun working on the strategy which includes a plan that would help protect the value of the stablecoin.

The social media giant has been expected to make this move in financial services after it hired David Marcus, former PayPal president to run the Messenger app who was later made the head of the company’s blockchain initiatives.

Facebook has been advertising its hiring procedure on Linkedin and has so far hired 40 people.



"Like many other companies, Facebook is exploring ways to leverage the power of blockchain technology. This new small team is exploring many different applications. We don’t have anything further to share," a company spokesman said in a statement to Bloomberg.

According to Stable.Report, a website that tracks stable coins, there has been a boom in the crypto projects during the past one year. The concept is to create a digital currency that will be more stable than Bitcoin.

This story originally appeared on Bloomberg.