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Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently announced a virtual store for Meta Avatars. The users can now acquire a variety of accessories to show off to their friends in the virtual world. It also introduced Meta Pay, a payments network that will also contribute to the payments network in the metaverse. The company has tried its hands at developing digital currencies before but tasted only failure. Meta's attempts to create a metaverse are not "going anywhere", said Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin. He believes that Meta's concept of a virtual space will only "misfire." The metaverse is a blend of offline and online experiences in an interactive digital space, where social interactions and transactions can occur simultaneously.
In a tweet responding to Dialectic co-founder Dean Eigenmann, Buterin said that the venture capitalist may be wrong about the concept of the metaverse. He said while he isn't against the metaverse and is bullish that the "metaverse is going to happen", he thinks tech corporates such as Mark Zuckerberg's Meta are not "going anywhere."
"We don't really know the definition of 'the metaverse' yet, it's far too early to know what people actually want," he said in a tweet.
For those who don't know, Vitalik Buterin is the co-founder of the most popular altcoin Ethereum which was initially dubbed the Bitcoin killer. The 28 y/o prodigy was holding a Thiel Fellowship in 2014 when he dropped out of college. The crypto philanthropist's views on the economy are rather radical for the kind of capitalist world we dwell in right now.
Facebook has directed a lot of energy toward metaverse concepts and even renamed the company Meta long after it acquired the virtual reality company Oculus. Many other corporate entities are looking to build some sort of metaverse and the term metaverse has been an overused catchphrase in thousands of press releases and articles.
Recently, Meta lost US$2.8 billion on its virtual reality division, Reality Labs, during the quarter ending in June. The substantial sum is the latest sign that CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Meta continue to spend heavily to pivot the social media giant to the so-called "metaverse." Meta said earlier this week it planned to raise the price of the Quest 2 headset from US$299 to US$399. This is not the first time Meta has lost money when it comes to the metaverse. Earlier in Q1, the company's metaverse business, Reality Labs, continued to struggle in the first three months of the year, losing US$2.96 billion.
Meta has revealed that it is continuing to hemorrhage money to try and make the metaverse a reality. Meta's Reality Labs division, responsible for its VR and AR ventures, thus an important part of the company's dreams of building a so-called metaverse, lost the company US$10 billion last year, and over the previous six months dropped nearly US$6 billion more.
In July, Zuckerberg made remarks on slowing the hiring strategy of the company and raising performance standards for current Meta employees.
On the metaverse side, the company also projected that Reality Labs would continue losing money in the next quarter. However, Zuckerberg has referred to this metaverse pivot as a long-term group of investments, as he believes that the metaverse will scale in time to house billions of users who all will be making transactions in the metaverse, with each one of these transactions being monetized by the company.
Zuckerberg presented Metaverse as the "successor to mobile internet" in his recent Facebook Connect keynote. By rebranding Facebook as Meta, Zuckerberg plans to unlock the potential of the metaverse, a concept that holds great potential but is currently in the research and development phase.
This comes on the heels of reports on Facebook's dwindling popularity – data from a March 2021 internal Facebook report showed that Facebook was losing credibility with young adults and teens. Bloomberg reported that Facebook shares fell less than 1 percent on October 25 as the market opened in New York.
In his vision for the Metaverse offering, Mark Zuckerberg aims to create the next version of the internet where you will not be limited to just passive consumption and reaction.
Instead, Facebook's Metaverse will take you on an immersive journey that will transform how you socialize, work, shop, play, and interact with the world around you.
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