Evan Cheng, Facebook’s Director of Engineering of three years, has now moved to the same position at the company’s recently established blockchain team, TechCrunch reported Friday, July 6.
The software engineer has updated his LinkedIn profile to reflect the newly acquired position, and the change has also been confirmed to TechCrunch by Facebook.
Prior to this, Cheng was heading Programming Languages and Runtimes at Facebook for about three years. Before joining the social media company, Cheng was working on back end engineering for the tech giant Apple for almost ten years.
Apart from taking the new position, Cheng is reportedly consulting a range of blockchain-related projects, including Singaporean blockchain platform Zilliqa and security-focused middleware provider ChainLink.
Facebook hit the headlines this January, when the company announced that it will ban initial coin offering (ICO) and cryptocurrency-related ads on its platform. It has subsequently relaxed its ban somewhat, re-allowing cryptocurrency projects to run advertisements.
The company’s head of messaging app David Marcus announced in May that Facebook has set up a team to explore the benefits of blockchain applications across the platform.
Last week, the Taiwanese subsidiary of multinational tech firm Microsoft announced it began working on a platform for enterprise blockchain development. In mid-June, Microsoft also revealed that it started developing a blockchain-based tracking platform in partnership with Adents, a provider of product serialization and traceability solutions.