28.03.2024

Facebook Affirms Libra Commitment With 50 New Job Openings in Ireland

The social media giant is looking to hire 50 people for its payments subsidiary Calibra – charged with creating a wallet for storing and sending libra – to start work at its offices in Dublin by the end of 2020. The news was first reported by the Irish Times on Monday.

Libra may have been scaled back but Facebook is significantly expanding the team working to support the stablecoin project.

A Calibra spokesperson told CoinDesk many of the new Dublin openings are for a new compliance team to liaise with regulators, as well as for specialists who can work on the wallet’s fraud protection program. There will also be a new customer service team to handle complaints – a sign the project is readying its launch.

«We’re actively hiring experts in fraud, compliance, workforce management and customer care to expand our operations team supporting the Calibra Wallet,» said Laura Morgan Walsh, Calibra’s head of operations. «We believe financial inclusion is a problem that can be solved and we are looking for more dedicated professionals to join us.»

Facebook first came to Ireland back in 2009. Attracted to the country’s low corporation tax, it set up its European headquarters in the capital. As well as being the firm’s European headquarters, much of the Irish office also works on global projects such as infrastructure engineering in regions including the Middle East and Africa.

Since 2009, the number of staff employed by Facebook and its partner companies in Ireland has ballooned from 30 to more than 5,000 people. The Calibra openings form part of a new recruitment drive that could take its Irish presence up to 7,000 people by the end of 2020.

Monday’s news comes less than a week after the Swiss-based Libra Association said it was going to scale back its ambitions in an effort to appease governments and central bankers. Instead of one crypto pegged to a basket of currencies, the new design will see multiple libras launch, each pegged to different fiats, such as the U.S. dollar and the euro.

Calibra – which while a Facebook subsidiary is a separate entity to the Libra Association – is already advertising for 26 job opportunities for its headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif. Most of these openings are for developers, backend staff and those savvy with regulatory compliance.

According to job postings on its LinkedIn profile, many of these openings have only had one or two applicants, despite some of them being advertised for well over a month.

Libra’s Long Road From a Facebook Lab to the Global Stage: A Timeline

What a long and winding two and half years it’s been for Libra, the digital currency project spawned by Facebook.

For much of that time, all that was known about the social network’s ambitions for the cryptocurrency space was rumor and conjecture. The full scope of the project, unveiled in June 2019, exceeded most of this speculation – including the revelation that Facebook aimed to decentralize control of its creation, starting by handing it over to a governing council. But the Libra Association’s actions since have mostly been to scale back its hopes and try to address a largely hostile reaction to the project among the world’s governments.

CoinDesk has been chronicling this saga every step of the way. What follows is a detailed timeline of the Libra project’s history, from the early signs that Mark Zuckerberg’s social network was sniffing around the blockchain industry to Libra’s recent watering-down of its once-bold plans. Bookmark this article, because we’ll keep updating it as the story continues to unfold.

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