Social media giant Facebook has ventured into the blockchain space by acquiring Chainspace, a startup working on developing smart contracts. The news was first reported by Cheddar on February 4 and is still largely unconfirmed by the company.
According to the report, unnamed sources claim that Facebook bought off the startup in an “acquihire,” which means that the acquisition of a company was primarily based on the skills and expertise of its staff. Four out of five researchers that wrote Chainspace’s academic whitepaper will be joining Facebook, Cheddar reported.
And while Facebook did not confirm or deny the rumors, a spokesperson for the company told Cheddar that it had hired on new researches but did now acquire any of the technology Chainspace was working on. The London-based startup was working on solving the problem of scalability in blockchain by applying sharding to smart contracts.
