On 4 February 2019, Facebook confirmed it had quietly acquired a London-based start-up called Chainspace. With an impressive track-record in developing blockchain technology, the start-up was the work of a small team of academics in University College London’s (UCL) world-leading computer science department.
This was an unusual acquisition. Facebook didn’t announce the deal; the social media giant only confirmed it had taken place after details were leaked to a reporter. Stranger still, it involved none of the start-up’s intellectual property. Instead, Facebook was buying the expertise of the UCL academics who had founded Chainspace. But perhaps the most unusual aspect of the acquisition was that, despite Facebook paying a significant amount of money to hire these engineers, two of the Chainspace co-founders remained on the university’s staff.
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