Facebook rebrands as Meta; NFTs to feature in Zuckerberg’s metaverse

Facebook has undergone a sweeping rebrand — it is now called Meta. In doing so, it signals its commitment to building a metaverse it regards as the next stage in the evolution of social connections.

“The metaverse is the next frontier. From now on we will focus on it, and not on Facebook,” said Zuckerberg.

From December 1, the company\’s shares will trade under the new ticker — MVRS.

The metaverse is the next evolution of social connection. It’s a collective project that will be created by people all over the world, and open to everyone. You’ll be able to socialize, learn, collaborate and play in ways that go beyond what’s possible today. pic.twitter.com/655yFRm8yZ

— Facebook (@Facebook) October 28, 2021

In July, the head of the corporation said that Facebook would soon cease to be the company associated with a social network. Instead, it would focus on building a metaverse, powered by VR—and AR headsets, mobile devices and gaming consoles. When asked about timing, he said: “Five years or so”.

The development of the metaverse is handled by Reality Labs, led by Vice President Andrew Bosworth.

“Today Portal and Oculus can teleport you into another person\’s room, regardless of physical distance, or into new virtual worlds […]. But to realise our full metaverse vision, we need to create the connective tissue between these spaces that will remove the constraints of physics,” — wrote Bosworth.

The metaverse product group will be led by former Instagram vice president Vishal Shah. He says the project will support NFTs, enabling the sale of these digital objects and allowing them to be displayed in three-dimensional spaces.

In an interview with The Verge, Zuckerberg said Facebook was “the most promising large tech company” in blockchain development. Therefore the corporation is “very interested in and broadly supportive of this space, recognising that it will play an important role in the future.”

He also noted that in the next decade people will spend time “in a fully immersive, three-dimensional version of the internet.” Access to it will be available not only to owners of Meta hardware, but also to users of devices from other manufacturers.

“People think of us only as a social-network operator, but we see ourselves differently: we are a technology company that builds solutions to help people communicate with one another. We believe that sets us apart from others, because the others focus on how people interact with technology, whereas we build technologies so that people can interact with one another,” — Zuckerberg.

The metaverse will feature a single account system for all social apps, as well as existing (Oculus Quest, Portal) and future devices.

“You will have a Facebook account, an Instagram account. You will also have a higher-level account. So if you do not want to use Facebook, you will not have to. One interesting analogy: I think we are moving toward the metaverse taking precedence over Facebook. It feels to me like Microsoft moving from Windows to the cloud,” explained Zuckerberg.

To realise his vision, Facebook plans to hire 10,000 engineers in EU countries. Recruitment will take place in Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Poland, the Netherlands and Ireland.

In September the company also announced the creation of a fund to finance programmes and external research to aid the project’s development. Over two years the organisation will spend $50 million on these aims.

During discussions with investors, Zuckerberg stressed that the company’s expenditures on AR/VR development, production of related hardware, and the development of apps and services would exceed $10 billion. He called the project the successor to mobile internet.

“I recognise the scale of the bet. This is not the investment that will pay off for us in the near term. Our goal is to help the metaverse reach a billion people,” said the head of Facebook.

We have already detailed the origins of the metaverse concept. The term first appeared in Neal Stephenson\’s 1992 science fiction novel Snow Crash.

Many companies view this paradigm differently, but it seems the topic will advance by leaps in the coming years, given Zuckerberg’s budgets.

Earlier American media coordinated a series of investigations into problems of the social network. In compiling The Facebook Papers, 17 outlets contributed, gaining access to internal company documents. The latest were published by former employee Frances Haugen.

Facebook was accused of negligent moderation of hate-speech posts and of failing to understand how its own algorithms work, which caused posts by people of one race to be prioritised in the feed. Journalists say the company\’s leadership allegedly interfered with the operation of the social network, giving privileges to certain political publications.

Earlier this year, a group of US senators urged Zuckerberg to immediately halt the Novi digital wallet pilot and commit not to bring the Diem stablecoin to market.

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