RSK maker IOVLabs buys Latin American Facebook rival Taringa

IOVLabs, the startup behind RSK’s Bitcoin-powered smart contract network, has acquired Taringa, one of the largest social networks in Latin America.

Launched in 2004, Taringa boasts more than 70 million visitors per month and 17.5 million registered users. Competing with the like of Facebook and Twitter, the social network is the third most popular in Latin America and second largest in Argentina, as per data from ComScore.

Under the deal, IOVLabs aims to enhance the quality of its platform, expand its services, and grow its customer base by millions. IOVLabs will also integrate RIF, RSK’s native token, into Taringa.

“Blockchain is a powerful technology, but it needs mass adoption to create meaningful value. This acquisition puts us at the forefront of adoption in distributed ledger technologies,” IOVLabs CEO Diego Gutierrez Saldivar said, noting that Taringa marks its first step towards that mass adoption of RSK and RIF platforms.

With the acquisition, Taringa will also implement and test RSK decentralized applications and infrastructure. RSK technology can be utilized to develop new features, including peer-to-peer exchanges and a dapp marketplace, within the Taringa platform.

“We are very excited about joining forces with the creators of RIF and RSK, as we truly believe that our users and communities should benefit from the contributions they make to our social network,” Matias Botbol, Taringa CEO, said.

He also hinted that they are already working on a tool that will reward Taringa users by actively participating in their communities.

The news comes after the Spanish-language social networking platform recently announced a new project in collaboration with MakerDAO and e-wallet provider Airtm to launch a stablecoin-based rewards system.

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