Facebook Onboards Two Former Coinbase Compliance Experts

Social networking giant Facebook has on-boarded two new compliance experts, who previously worked at United States major cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase.

Mikheil Moucharrafie joined Facebook as compliance officer after almost four years of working at Coinbase. At the exchange, Moucharrafie held positions such as support analyst and quality assurance tester, anti-money laundering (AML)/bank secrecy investigator, compliance manager, and risk manager.

Jeff Cartwright spent nearly five years at Coinbase as a compliance manager, head of internal audit, and director of regulatory risk and exams. Prior to joining Coinbase, Cartwright was involved in AML consultancy at Big Four firm KPMG and AML compliance investigations at Goldman Sachs. At Facebook, Cartwright will hold the position of a policy and compliance manager.

As Cointelegraph reported in March, Facebook began hiring PayPal staff ahead of its rumored cryptocurrency launch. The company started onboarding dedicated blockchain staff last year, under the auspices of David Marcus, himself a former president of PayPal. Now, around 20% of the team’s 50 members come from the payments platform, a situation reminiscent of the so-called “PayPal Mafia” executive group of the early 2000s.

That same month, Facebook’s HQ in Menlo Park, California, opened five new positions in its blockchain department. The company was apparently seeking a growth product manager, product manager, data scientist, software engineer and business operations manager to join its blockchain team.

Recently, news broke that Facebook acquired the rights to the “Libra” trademark for its secretive cryptocurrency project. A source familiar with the matter confirmed that Facebook is recruiting financial firms to develop its own crypto and that the project’s codename and product name is Libra.