Social networking giant Facebook has appointed Evan Cheng as the new Director of Engineering, Blockchain, TechCrunch reported July 5th.

Facebook has confirmed the report.

Cheng previously served as the director of engineering at Facebook and was responsible for leading Programming Languages & Runtimes. Cheng joined Facebook from Apple where he served as Senior Manager, Low Level Tools, and also worked on compilation technology and other back-end engineering.

In May, Facebook launched a blockchain division, with David Marcus leaving his role as the head of Messenger to set up the group in order to explore blockchain technology. In addition, Kevin Weil, head of product at Instagram, also joined the blockchain initiative.

Earlier this year, Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg had expressed his interest to study the positive and negative aspects of encryption and cryptocurrency. He said that these technologies “take power from centralized systems and put it back into people's hands,” adding that he wanted to study these techs to understand “how best to use them in our services.”