By Jasper Hamill
First, it was called The Facebook, before founder Mark Zuckerberg ditched “the” and conquered the world through the popular social media platform
But now the social network formerly known as Facebook has a new name: Meta.
Described as a “social technology company”, Meta will focus on creating an alternate reality called “The Metaverse”.
The launch of Meta comes as Facebook edges ever closer to rolling out its own cryptocurrency.
Despite opposition from lawmakers and regulators, it has launched a pilot of a wallet called Novi in the US and Guatemala, using the Paxos Dollar stablecoin rather than Meta’s own Diem.
The Metaverse will “feel like a hybrid of today’s online social experiences, sometimes expanded into three dimensions or projected into the physical world”, Meta wrote.
“It will let you share immersive experiences with other people even when you can’t be together — and do things together you couldn’t do in the physical world,” Meta continued.
“It’s the next evolution in a long line of social technologies, and it’s ushering in a new chapter for our company.”
Mark Zuckerberg further expanded on the concept of the metaverse in a “founder’s letter”, which suggested crypto and NFTs would be accepted in this new reality.
He said The Metaverse would be an “embodied internet where you’re in the experience, not just looking at it” and claimed users will be “able to do almost anything you can imagine - get together with friends and family, work, learn, play, shop, create - as well as completely new experiences that don’t really fit how we think about computers or phones today”.
“Privacy and safety need to be built into the metaverse from day one,” Zuck continued.
“So do open standards and interoperability. This will require not just novel technical work — like supporting crypto and NFT projects in the community — but also new forms of governance.”
In the future, Zuck imagines us logging into The Metaverse and living our lives in his corporate matrix, “teleporting” to work and appearing in the office as a hologram or meeting up with parents in virtual form.
“??Think about how many physical things you have today that could just be holograms in the future,” he continued.
“Your TV, your perfect work setup with multiple monitors, your board games, and more — instead of physical things assembled in factories, they’ll be holograms designed by creators around the world.
“You’ll move across these experiences on different devices — augmented reality glasses to stay present in the physical world, virtual reality to be fully immersed, and phones and computers to jump in from existing platforms.
“This isn’t about spending more time on screens; it’s about making the time we already spend better.”
Zuck may be hoping that his bid to build a new reality meets less opposition than his plan to build a cryptocurrency, which was once called Libra but is now called Diem and will eventually be stored in a wallet called Novi.
A small number of people in the US and Guatemala have been invited to test Novi using an iOS or Android app and funding their accounts with a debit card.
The pilot was announced on Twitter by Novi boss David Marcus, who said Novi will allow remittances to be sent with no fees.
Marcus said Novi is a “challenger in payments” and shared stats that showed that 56% of people in Guatemala lack access to financial services, despite 100% of the population owning mobile phones. Money sent from family and friends abroad contributes more than 14% of GDP to the Guatemalan economy and 90% of those remittances come from the US.
Novi uses Paxos, a dollar-linked stablecoin, which Marcus described as a “well-designed stablecoin that’s been operating successfully for over three years and has important regulatory and consumer protection attributes”. Novi is being launched in partnership with Coinbase and will use Diem “once it receives regulatory approval and goes live”.
Meta hopes that Novi will allow payments to be sent from right within apps like Whatsapp and other Zuck-owned services.
However, opposition to the plans is already mounting.
A group of US Senators including Brian Schatz, Sherrod Brown, Richard Blumenthal, Elizabeth Warren and Tina Smith wrote to Mark Zuckerberg earlier in October to oppose his plans to launch a wallet and cryptocurrency.
“Facebook is once again pursuing digital currency plans on an aggressive timeline and has already launched a pilot for a payments infrastructure network, even though these plans are incompatible with the actual financial regulatory landscape,” the senators wrote.
“Facebook cannot be trusted to manage a payment system or digital currency when its existing ability to manage risks and keep consumers safe has proven wholly insufficient.”
A spokesperson for Novi insisted that it was “not Facebook” but rather an independent group that is just one of more than two dozen members of the Diem Association.
In response to the Senators’ letter, Diem said it had the “most robust controls in the industry” and expressed “confidence that Diem’s payment system is secure, will protect consumers, and will combat financial crime.”
It continued: “Beyond financial crime compliance, we engaged extensively with an inter-agency regulatory team about the design of the project. As part of that review, we made adjustments to reflect feedback we received, and we were informed by a senior regulator that Diem is the best-designed stablecoin project that the U.S. government had seen.”
Facebook’s new moniker has led to an explosion of memes and jokes, with a tweet going viral which joked that Meta was an acronym for “Manipulating Emotions Through Advertising”.
It also caused much hilarity among Hebrew speakers, because Meta sounds like a word that translates as “dead”.
“Thank you for providing all Hebrew speakers a good reason to laugh,” one Twitter user wrote.
Meta comes from the Greek word meaning “beyond”, which Zuckerberg claimed to know about because he studied Classics.
