Facebook talks to U.S. regulator about its cryptocurrency

Facebook's upcoming cryptocurrency project is getting more real by the day.

According to the Financial Times, the social media giant is in talks with the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) about its project to launch a digital coin of its own.

The report quotes Christopher Giancarlo, the head of the CFTC, as saying that the regulator is in "very early stages of conversations" with Facebook about the project.

No formal application has been filed, so Giancarlo did not speak about specifics. He did say the regulator is "very interested" in understanding the project better.

GlobalCoin -- a probable name for Facebook's crypto-coin -- is likely to be a stablecoin, which is a special type of cryptocurrency tied to the value of a traditional asset, like the U.S. dollar.

Stablecoins exist in the world of cryptocurrencies, and several are being actively traded right now. But since details about Facebook's stablecoin aren't known yet, it's not certain it would even fall under the jurisdiction of CFTC, which has authority over futures and derivatives.

Facebook has acknowledged it's working on blockchain technology several times over the past year or so, but the company insisted it only has a "small team" working on it and refused to give any other details. However, the company's recent hires, combined with a recent WSJ report claiming that the project includes both a stablecoin and a global payment network, indicate that Facebook is taking blockchain technology very seriously. A recent report by the BBC claimed that Facebook plans to launch GlobalCoin as soon as 2020, with more details coming this summer.