Facebook’s Metaverse will need to make Room for Bitcoin and Crypto

Facebook, more precisely Meta, is a big company with big aspirations. The man behind it, Mark Zuckerberg, got a Hollywood movie about his life and accomplishments more than a decade ago. Since then, the same man and the same company have not been idle. That goes for the crypto domain as well, where their Libra project from 2020 failed completely and utterly, showing that money cannot be simply thrown against the cryptocurrency wall to generate new and exciting global trends. But, being that Zuckerberg is Zuckerberg, this has not dissuaded him from trying new and even bolder things. All of that continues to happen with a rising level of concern and controversy about what it means to use social media like Facebook. 

Cambridge Analytica and the more recent Instagram and childrens’ mental health scandals all show that there is so much negative and positive rolled into one when it comes to Facebook. Now, with the rebranding of the mother company of this social media into Meta, Zuckerberg wants to make even more changes to the way we live our global lives. In his Metaverse, as the recent video presentation showed, there is room for so much – from changing how a person looks to esports, and mass media on a massive scale unlike anything humanity has seen so far. But, there is also a lack of crypto in the Metaverse. However, experts and analysts believe that, no matter what Mark Zuckerberg wants, the global population both wants and needs crypto in this setup.

Metaverse All-In Bet

For many digital industries experts, but also those who closely follow how Facebook, or Meta, conducts its business operations, the recent video showcase was proof that the company is really investing all into the metaverse. Simply speaking, the metaverse is an ever-present digital layer that is located on the top of the actual, physical world. Meta is building that layer so that it is accessible through augmented reality and virtual reality technologies. In essence or even in relative details, this concept is not something new. 

For decades, even before the explosion of the cyberpunk genre in the 1980s, science fiction writers have been talking and prognosticating when this type of technology and ecosystem might appear. The process is simple – users simply put on their digital headsets or some other tech and appear in the all-digital world of wonder and endless possibility. While there have been many attempts to figure out some kind of a smaller setup for this idea, none of them so far created anything worthwhile that collected any serious public interest or global traction. Meta is ready to change that with their metaverse and the plans for that are not buried in the distant future. 

Speculative Fiction

No matter how Meta wants to portray the metaverse, the fact remains that it still feels like something from a work of speculative fiction. The vision of Mark Zuckerberg, as many immediately noted, seems like something directly taken from the movie and book Ready Player One. What makes the whole setup even weirder is the fact that Zuckerberg fits into the role of the villain perfectly. There is no chance that the Facebook marketing and research executives did not notice that. Instead, the pitch actually wants to play on the same fact in some form. Also, the promise of a tech advancement that is needed to make this colorful yet still bleak future world of virtual reality a real reality is still far away. 

Companies like Oculus have been creating VR headsets and controllers for years and platforms like Steam readily hold and sell VR games. But, there has not been a single game or hardware piece that could be called a killer app that opens the floodgates of adoption and new users. The same goes for AR – sure, Pokemon Go was a huge hit, but that happened years ago. No huge hits followed and mobile games are rarely seen scanning their environment through AR application features. So, while Meta wants to see the metaverse very soon in action, it seems that it will simply fail to create the needed tools anytime soon. Crypto aspects of such an environment, however, are already ready and in action. 

NFT and Digital Realms

While Meta is chasing the aspects of a digital realm that are still not even in tech laboratories and R&D centers, some aspects that would be crucial to the metaverse are already here. One of them is the backbone of the digital financing that would take place in such an environment. NFTs and digital currencies like bitcoin, in general, are filling that space all on their own and without any help from external tech solutions. Instead, they are simply offering a functional and effective solution that people are using. 

NFTs are used to define anything digitally, from plots of lands to art, sell and hold it, follow its transactions and pathways between users. So, any metaverse object and item could have its NFT and this is accessible in a completely different network of the same distributed, blockchain ledger. For direct user monetary interactions, crypto would work better than any fiat money and would be accessible in any sport in the world. Meta might not want to have those solutions in its digital playground, but they will be there nonetheless, as many other organizations, even entire countries, have already figured out.

Place for All

Metaverse, in many ways, should be that digital place for anyone, no matter who they are, where they live, or what they do. In that sense, there is a strong feeling of egalitarianism and liberty that Zuckerberg would likely love to see more readily associated with the metaverse. However, its success is dependent on the company’s ability to flesh out that idea into a workable and accessible platform. Like in the case of Libra or projects like Google Glass, that outcome is a matter of chance and luck as much as technology and company support. But, in any case, if it manages to do that, crypto will be there, waiting for the users, regardless of the fact whether Zuckerberg wants to see it there or not.