Meta Announces Coming Digital Payment and NFT Options as it Advances Towards the Metaverse

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Giv­en the cur­rent volatil­i­ty in cryp­to mar­kets, which have been intrin­si­cal­ly con­nect­ed to the cur­rent NFT trend, it seems like a strange time for Meta to be mak­ing a big­ger push on NFTs, and its var­i­ous NFT projects across its apps.

But that’s what it’s doing, with Meta CEO Mark Zucker­berg announc­ing com­ing dig­i­tal pay­ment options, and Meta pre­view­ing new NFT fea­tures, along with a new guide as to how NFTs work to help peo­ple get into the market.

First off, on pay­ments – as part of a broad­er con­fir­ma­tion of the re-nam­ing of ‘Face­book Pay’ to ‘Meta Pay’ instead, Zucker­berg has also announced that Meta’s work­ing on a new ‘wal­let for the meta­verse’ which will pro­vide a more inte­grat­ed way to secure­ly man­age your dig­i­tal iden­ti­ty and purchases.

As explained by Zucker­berg:

In the future there will be all sorts of dig­i­tal items you might want to cre­ate or buy — dig­i­tal cloth­ing, art, videos, music, expe­ri­ences, vir­tu­al events, and more. Proof of own­er­ship will be impor­tant, espe­cial­ly if you want to take some of these items with you across dif­fer­ent ser­vices. Ide­al­ly, you should be able to sign into any meta­verse expe­ri­ence and every­thing you’ve bought should be right there. There’s a long way to get there, but this kind of inter­op­er­abil­i­ty will deliv­er much bet­ter expe­ri­ences for peo­ple and larg­er oppor­tu­ni­ties for creators.”

This is Meta’s big, long-term vision, that users will be able to hold own­er­ship of dig­i­tal items beyond a sin­gu­lar app or space – so if you buy an out­fit for your char­ac­ter in Fort­nite, you’d be able to wear that same out­fit on your Face­book Avatar in a busi­ness meet­ing, theoretically.

There’s a long way to go in mak­ing this a real­i­ty, as Zucker­berg notes, but Meta has also recent­ly signed up to a new ‘Meta­verse Stan­dards Forum’ to estab­lish inter­op­er­abil­i­ty stan­dards for the meta­verse space, while this new wal­let would also look to con­nect with oth­er apps and tools, beyond Meta’s apps, to facil­i­tate such connection.

It’ll take time, and many agree­ments to enable such. But this is anoth­er indi­ca­tor of where Meta is head­ed, and the oppor­tu­ni­ties of the next dig­i­tal con­nec­tion space.

Which is also where NFTs, the­o­ret­i­cal­ly, come in, and after launch­ing an ini­tial test of NFT dis­play options on Insta­gram last month, Meta is now look­ing to expand that to more cre­ators ‘in a hand­ful of addi­tion­al coun­tries’, as it seeks to estab­lish anoth­er means to facil­i­tate dig­i­tal connection.

“Cre­ators and col­lec­tors will be able to share their dig­i­tal col­lectibles across Face­book and Insta­gram after we begin rolling out the fea­ture on Face­book with select US cre­ators at a lat­er date. We’ll also soon start to test NFTs in Insta­gram Sto­ries with SparkAR.”

Insta­gram NFTs are already view­able in AR, and the inte­gra­tion into Sto­ries will pro­vide anoth­er, advanced means of show­cas­ing dig­i­tal art­works in the app, which could help to spark more inter­est in the broad­er NFT trend.

Though as not­ed, that inter­est is wan­ing, with search traf­fic for NFTs declin­ing over time.

Google Trends data for 'NFTs'

And as more col­lec­tors get burned by rug pulls and the ongo­ing cryp­to mar­ket crash, it seems that the NFT fad will taper off sig­nif­i­cant­ly – but the broad­er view, as Meta notes, is that dig­i­tal items will see greater focus as we advance towards the next stage, maybe not as pro­file pic­tures of bored apes, as such, but as vari­able dig­i­tal objects, which could be trad­ed and dis­played via the same means as cur­rent NFTs.

Which has mer­it. I per­son­al­ly don’t think that any­one will be impressed by your crap­py JPEGs of bad­ly drawn char­ac­ters in future, but I do see that the capac­i­ty to pur­chase dig­i­tal items, and retain own­er­ship of such across spaces, will be of sig­nif­i­cant val­ue at some stage.

That’s why it’s worth learn­ing about NFTs, and under­stand­ing the under­ly­ing process­es, which Meta is also look­ing to facil­i­tate with its new NFT overview.

Meta NFT guide

It’s a basic explain­er of the core prin­ci­ples of NFTs – which, in some ways, are get­ting a bad name because of all the NFT bros and the mis­guid­ed atten­tion on scam­my ‘art’ projects in this ini­tial phase.

And then, again, there’s the mar­ket col­lapse, which makes this an odd push — but maybe now is the right time to learn, before NFTs become some­thing else entire­ly dif­fer­ent with­in the meta­verse space.

Log­i­cal­ly, Meta’s new NFT announce­ments were orig­i­nal­ly timed to coin­cide with the large-scale NFT NYC event hap­pen­ing this week, which has seen large groups of mid­dle-aged men trudg­ing their way through the city streets, and tak­ing Insta­gram videos of dig­i­tal art­works plas­tered across buildings.

Despite many procla­ma­tions, that’s not the future of dig­i­tal con­nec­tion, but the under­ly­ing process of NFT trad­ing may well be a key aspect, which is why these new announce­ments from Meta are impor­tant, even in the cur­rent bear cycle for the cryp­to space.

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