Social media giant Facebook recently announced a series of plans in their recent team meeting on Thursday where the company’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced a name change, noting that it would now be called” Meta,” an indication of its interest to be a metaverse.

Facebook announced a slew of new initiatives to support its Metaverse goal, including a $150 million fund to encourage users to participate. According to reports, Facebook has stated that it intends to invest billions of dollars in bringing its 3-D worlds idea to fruition.

The name change was not the only move towards a virtual world that Facebook announced. It also revealed that the organization’s metaverse would feature support for non-fungible tokens(NFTs,) which would be a huge boost to your Ethereum protocol, where digital collectibles have proven to be a huge success.

According to Facebook Head of Metaverse Products Vishal Shah, plans for NFT support will make it easier for people to sell limited edition digital objects such as NFTs, display them in their digital spaces and securely sell them to the next person.

Shah said, “Our goal is to provide a way for as many players as possible to build a business in the metaverse.”

While it is not fully clear how NFTs would fit into Facebook’s vision, a previous statement from Facebook Financial head David Marcus suggests that NFTs could be a part of the offering from Facebook’s  Novi.  Marcus said, in an interview in August, “It’s too early to talk about our plans, but we’re definitely looking at a number of plans to get involved in the space, because we’re in a good position to do so,”

Facebook Planning huge Expansion

The announcement comes as Facebook expands its virtual presence. The social media titan already owns virtual reality headset maker Oculus, and its metaverse unit recently announced a huge hiring push.

The monetization drive may coincide with the company’s Novi crypto wallet, which was met with opposition from US lawmakers during a pilot rollout earlier this month. Diem, the project’s eponymous stablecoin, is currently absent from the project. Facebook’s head of payments and financial services, David Marcus, recently tweeted that the redesign would bring all of the company’s payments and financial services businesses and products, including Facebook Pay, under the Novi banner.

A Virtual World in View

Over the last few years, Facebook has been actively developing plans and tools to further its plans for a virtual world.

It has introduced a series of portal-video calling devices, including the Ray-Ban Stories glasses and various Oculus virtual-reality headsets. In a note on Thursday, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg highlighted the ambitions of the organization. 

He wrote, “Our hope is that within the next decade, the metaverse will reach a billion people, host hundreds of billions of dollars of digital commerce, and support jobs for millions of creators and developers.”

It remains to be seen how these changes would affect the company and its users.