Two United States senators have penned a letter asking Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg to halt a plan to allow young adults to access the firm’s metaverse platform, Horizon Worlds. In a March 1 letter, Senators Edward Markey and Richard Blumenthal said that Meta’s reported plan to “invite young users into a digital space rife with potential harms” should not be implemented if the strategy was driven by profit. According to the two lawmakers, allowing teenagers between 13 and 17 years old access to the virtual environment posed “serious risks”, citing privacy concerns, eye strain, and online bullying. “Meta’s plan to …

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is still hopeful about the company’s Metaverse plans regardless of the billions of dollars it’s sucking up from the company, claiming “someone has to build that.” Appearing remotely for an interview at the Nov. 30 DealBook Summit in New York, Zuckerberg was asked his thoughts on whether the tech giants’ Metaverse play was still viable given its cost and the doubts cast over the platform, answering: “I think things look very different on a ten-year time horizon than the zone that we're in for the next few years [...] I'm still completely optimistic about all the …

In changing the name of its parent company to Meta, Facebook put a stake in the ground: It would be the symbol of the evolution of the internet, the metaverse. Whether we liked it or not. According to Meta, the metaverse is “a set of digital spaces to socialize, learn, play and more.” Its first true attempt came in the form of Horizon Worlds, a virtual reality universe so lifeless and devoid of content that it has people asking if the metaverse is a step forward or backward. Thankfully, it won’t matter. The metaverse, a term from long before Facebook …

Who would’ve thought that the implosion of Terra, the collapse of Three Arrows Capital and the bankruptcies of Celsius and Voyager wouldn’t be the most terrible crypto stories of 2022? In retrospect, crypto’s day of reckoning — and the new low for the cycle — hadn’t arrived even after all these tumultuous events. The industry’s cyclical execution occurred this week when FTX — the world’s second-largest crypto exchange — was feared to be insolvent and on the brink of collapse. Those fears stemmed from FTX’s incestuous relationship with Alameda Research, a trading firm founded by FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried — …

Social media and tech giant Meta is reportedly gearing up for “large-scale layoffs” this week amid rising costs and a recent collapse of its share price. According to Wall Street Journal (WSJ) report on Nov. 6 citing people familiar with the matter, the planned layoffs could impact thousands of employees in a broad range of divisions across Meta’s 87,000-strong workforce. It is not currently understood whether the firm's Reality Labs division, which registered a $3.7 billion loss in the third quarter, would see staff cuts. Last week, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that the company would be focusing its investment …

It’s been just over a year since social media giant Facebook rebranded as Meta at the Facebook Connect conference on Oct. 28, 2021. The name change reflected the company’s growing ambitions to transcend past social media and into the world of Web3, crypto, NFTs, and the Metaverse — virtual worlds where consumers are likely to spend more of their time for both work and play. The company has been busy. In December 2021, Meta debuted its Horizon Worlds virtual reality social networking project, while it also opened up advertising for more crypto ads on Facebook. In April 2022, reports emerged …

Facebook’s rebranding into Meta was Mark Zukerberg’s latest attempt to retain dominance in the social media world of Web3, specifically, the Metaverse. On the occasion of Meta completing one year on the rebrand, Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF), the CEO of the crypto exchange FTX, shared his thoughts on the rebranding and what it means for the future of Meta. Zuckerberg’s $100 billion Metaverse experiment first raised eyebrows when the CEO released the avatar for Meta’s Horizon Worlds VR platform. Subsequent releases of the Zuckerberg avatar fell prey to internet memes, although each new iteration seemed visually better than its predecessor. According …

Not everyone is convinced that Mark Zuckerberg’s massive metaverse experiment is a good idea. Since Facebook rebranded to Meta in 2021, the social media giant’s focus has increasingly shifted to connecting the digital and physical worlds through augmented reality. However, a shareholder of the company recently issued a letter to the CEO calling the metaverse investment “super-sized and terrifying.” It didn’t take long for those concerns to be justified. Meta published its third-quarter financial results after the bell on Oct. 26 and, perhaps unsurprisingly, its metaverse division underperformed. Meta’s Reality Labs lost a whopping $3.672 billion during the quarter, mirroring …

Big Five technology player Meta is still burning cash through its Metaverse research and development arm Reality Labs with a $3.67 billion loss posted for the third quarter of 2022, stating those losses will further deepen next year. The company’s Q3 2022 earnings released on Oct. 26 show the biggest-ever quarterly losses for Reality Labs from earnings dating back to the fourth quarter of 2020, the business also made $285 million in revenue for the third quarter, its lowest on record within that time. With its Reality Labs business marking its third straight quarterly loss totaling $9.44 billion so far …

A shareholder’s open letter to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has labeled the tech giant's investment into the Metaverse as “super-sized and terrifying.” The shareholder has urged the company to scale down its investment in the Metaverse and its related technology arm amid a significant fall in its stock price over the last 18 months. The open letter was published on Oct. 24 and was directed at Zuckerberg and the board of directors. It was authored by Brad Gerstner, CEO and founder of technology investment firm Altimeter Capital, which owns roughly a 0.11% share in Meta, according to Hedge Follow. Gerstner …

The future of how we socialize online is being defined as we speak, and it’s far too important to leave things to the likes of Meta and other mega social companies. Just a surface-level look at Meta’s history is enough to understand its tendency to severely miss the mark. Some companies like to use Web3 principles to right the wrongs of Web2. And as a poster child for large, centralized organizations, Meta offers us some of the most useful examples of those wrongs. Let’s touch on three times that Meta fell short of building the future of online social experiences. …

OpenSea has officially opened up support for the Avalanche blockchain, with the move providing broader access for the network’s native NFT projects and faster transactions for OpenSea users. The Avalanche team noted in an Oct. 12 blog post that around 10 of the network’s native NFT projects have been initially listed on OpenSea, with more to come. “On Avalanche, OpenSea users will benefit from the fastest time to finality for NFT trades — regularly settling transactions in under a second — and consistently low transaction fees as a result of Avalanche’s success in horizontally scaling with Subnets,” the post reads. …