Meta wants to become a metaverse bank

Meta wants to become a metaverse bank

Meta is planning a digital wallet that allows people to buy goods from the Metaverse and manage their identities.

Mark Zuckerberg announced this in a Facebook post. In the post, the Meta CEO announces the renaming of Facebook Pay to Meta Pay. Facebook Pay allowed people to shop, send money, donate and more in the social network's app ecosystem. Meta Pay is the same service, only the name has changed.

But it's not expected to stop there. "Beyond the current features, we're working on something new: a wallet for the metaverse that lets you securely manage your identity, what you own, and how you pay," Zuckerberg writes.

Zuckerberg keeps mum on the technical underpinnings

In the Metaverse future, he says, there will be many types of digital goods: clothing, art and even experiences that people will be able to buy or create and sell themselves. Meta's Metaverse wallet will provide proof of ownership and ensure that people can move goods back and forth between different Metaverse platforms.

This interoperability serves the ecosystem and the creators of digital goods. "The more places you can easily use your digital goods, the more you'll value them, which creates a bigger market for creators. The more easily you can transact, the bigger the opportunity for creators should get as well. We're looking forward to building this out," Zuckerberg said.

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The CEO does not reveal how Meta intends to implement this vision. His hints sound like blockchain and crypto-wallets. It's not far-fetched: The company is currently working on integrating NFTs into Instagram and Facebook, and rumor has it that even the VR ecosystem will get NFT support.

Metaverse standards to help

Helping with interoperability could be a recently launched initiative by Khronos Group and several large companies, including Meta. It envisions the creation of uniform Metaverse standards that could one day allow the same digital assets to be used on a wide variety of Metaverse platforms. Detrimental to this effort is the fact that major market players such as Google and Apple are not even participating in this work.

Meta is moving forward, nonetheless, and recently introduced a store for avatar clothing. The first garments are from designers such as Prada and Balenciaga and only work with Meta avatars.

Sources: Mark Zuckerberg via Facebook