FT: Facebook Hires Standard Chartered Bank’s Head of Public Affairs for Crypto Project

Facebook has reportedly hired Standard Chartered Bank’s head of public affairs Ed Bowles for its cryptocurrency project, the Financial Times reports on June 14.

Per the report, Facebook hired the senior bank lobbyist in anticipation of the greater regulatory scrutiny in Europe over its plans to launch its own crypto asset and other financial services to its 2.4 billion users. Bowles will join the company in September, and will reportedly be its London-based director of public policy.

Earlier today, news broke that Facebook has allegedly sealed backing from over a dozen firms that include Visa, Mastercard, PayPal and Uber for the aforementioned cryptocurrency project, dubbed “Libra.”

A European Facebook executive recently also reportedly confirmed that a white paper outlining the cryptocurrency’s essentials is set to be published on June 18.

As a Cointelegraph analysis notes, both Facebook and Telegram are examples of major social platforms that have been quietly working on their own native cryptocurrency tokens.

Encrypted instant messaging service Telegram had officially released a test client for its Telegram Open Network (TON) at the end of May. Apart from the TON Lite Client itself, users can now also install a configuration file for smart contract development, which connects the Lite Client to a test server.