Social media platform giant Facebook has changed its name to ‘Meta’ as part of their ambitious move to build their own metaverse. The company said on Oct 28th that its metaverse will incorporate NFTs.
Facebook, Now Meta, Heading Towards Metaverse
Metaverse has become a trending topic in 2021 and is considered to be a market full of potential. It is a shared virtual universe that combines physical, virtual reality and the internet. Facebook renamed itself to Meta as a bet on the growing value of the metaverse. Its stock ticker will be changed from FB to MVRS, effective from Dec 1st.
As explained in the company’s introduction to Meta, Facebook’s metaverse “will feel like a hybrid of today’s online social experiences, sometimes expanded into three dimensions or projected into the physical world”. The company believes that the metaverse will create a brand new type of virtual commodity, market and service economy.
“Our hope is that within the next decade, the metaverse will reach a billion people, host hundreds of billions of dollars of digital commerce, and support jobs for millions of creators and developers.” Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook and CEO of Meta, said in an open letter.
The tech company revealed that it will launch a series of metaverse units including VR hardware Cambria and updating Spark AR. NFTs will also be a part of Meta’s universe.
NFTs will be Supported in Facebook’s Metaverse
NFTs, Non-Fungible Tokens, are critical for metaverses as it will help to ascertain the digital ownership of identities, products or assets of different items in the metaverse. Many believe that NFTs are the access to the metaverse.
“Having programmable money and smart contracts on top of a purpose-built blockchain (Diem) is going to be transformational for the metaverse,” David Marcus, head of Facebook Financial and the Novi crypto wallet, said in August. “If you’re a creator and you’re creating an NFT. You may want to rent your NFT, you may want to sell your NFT. You’ll have to store your NFT.”
To content creators and developers, Facebook’s metaverse will offer more business opportunities through NFTs. “Our goal is to provide a way for as many players as possible to build a business in the metaverse.” Vishal Shah, Facebook Head of Metaverse, said.
According to Shah, Facebook’s metaverse will make it easier for people to sell Limited Edition digital objects like NFTs and display them in their digital space and even resell them to the next person securely.
Details on how Facebook’s metaverse will differ itself from existing open source metaverses like Decentraland or how it will incorporate NFTs into its metaverse remain undisclosed, although it is generally believed that its NFTs and corresponding economic mechanism will involve Facebook’s Novi crypto wallet and Diem (a proposed stablecoin formerly known as Libra), which was pushed back by US lawmakers last month and ordered to “discontinue” for the risks it poses to “financial stability”.
