With an aim to make its cryptocurrency ‘Libra’ customer-friendly, Facebook recently acquired Servicefriend, an Israel-based startup that builds AI-driven bots for messaging apps, TheMarker reported.
Servicefriend, better known for its ‘Hybrid Bot Architecture’, develops bots that interact with clients via messaging or text apps, using artificial intelligence. The company claims that it provides enterprises the scalability of a bot with the intelligence and understanding of a human.
Facebook announced its cryptocurrency Libra and digital wallet Calibra in June 2019. Libra Association is a pool of large enterprises and non-profits, including Visa, Spotify, Mastercard, Lyft, eBay, and Uber, which are responsible for processing the transactions of the crypto coin and blockchain. Despite the regulatory issues, Facebook is moving ahead with its Libra coin, which is expected to launch in 2020.
“We acquire smaller tech companies from time to time. We don’t always discuss our plans,” Facebook said in a media statement. “Facebook’s plan is to build a range of financial services for people to use Calibra to pay out and receive Libra as for example, to send money to contacts, pay bills, top up their phones, buy things and more.”
Facebook recently announced that it’s working with bug bounty platform HackerOne to launch a bug bounty program for its Libra Association. The social media giant is rewarding up to US$ 10,000 to security researchers who discover potential flaws in Libra’s testnet.
“The Libra Association launched its public bug bounty program on August 27, 2019. The Libra Bug Bounty program is intended to strengthen the security of the Blockchain. It enables developers to submit bugs and alert the association to security and privacy issues and vulnerabilities to help ensure a scalable, reliable, and secure launch,” Facebook said in an official statement.