Facebook has bought smart contracts start - up Chainspace . An academic paper (PDF) from 2017 describes Chainspace as a smart-contract platform that uses a technique called sharding to get transactions passing through an order of magnitude more quickly than Ethereum can. The deal is the company ’s first blockchain - related purchase and Facebook predicted Chainspace ’s technology could help Facebook break a rumoured WhatsApp cryptocurrency . Using a technique called sharding , Chainspace can accelerate transactions to a speed faster than ethereum , which is also working on a sharding approach to speed up deals . Facebook said the slow processing speed is one of the reasons smart contracts and ethereum are not more widely used .
Facebook has bought smart contracts start - up Chainspace . The deal is the company ’s first blockchain - related purchase and Facebook predicted Chainspace ’s technology could help Facebook break a rumoured WhatsApp cryptocurrency . Using a technique called sharding , Chainspace can accelerate transactions to a speed faster than ethereum , which is also working on a sharding approach to speed up deals . Facebook said the slow processing speed is one of the reasons smart contracts and ethereum are not more widely used .