Facebook ‘Acquihires’ Chainspace Blockchain Startup

According to Cheddar, Facebook has reportedly made a deal with a blockchain startup Chainspace on February 4. The source said that Facebook was interested in a small startup primarily due to the skills and experience of its employees, not the services or products that the company develops — such acquisition is called ‘acquihire’.

Four out of five researchers who worked on the Chainspace academic whitepaper are to join Facebook. The representative of the social network noted that, despite the hiring of researchers, the company had not acquired a single Chainspace technology.

At the end of 2018, Facebook had already shown interest in blockchain technologies: vacancies of software engineers and data scientists were posted on the company's website.

Chainspace was founded by researchers from University College London. The main goal of the new enterprise was to study and search for solutions for blockchain scalability problems, in particular, by applying sharding to smart contracts. Sharding runs on the parallel computing power of several machines connected to a network — they split the transaction verification process. The network is divided into smaller sections, each of which uses a smaller scale consensus protocol. Such a network is capable of processing hundreds of transactions per second per shard, which should increase the scalability of processes in the blockchain.

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