It must be frustrating for Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg. Since college, up until recently, he had nothing but good luck, incredible wealth and power. Now, new privacy policies, the ascendancy of TikTok stealing market share from the social media platforms controlled by him, and a multi-billion dollar pivot into the metaverse are hurting both Zuckerberg’s reputation and net worth.
Meta, according to the Financial Times, is exploring creating digital asset tokens for people to use in his metaverse project. His crypto is derisively referred to as “Zuck Bucks.” This could be another pivot, like the metaverse, to find additional revenue streams to make up for their recent financial challenges. Meta famously lost more than $220 billion in stock market valuation in February due to the various assaults on its core business model.
Developed by Meta Financial Technologies, the Zuck Buck would serve as an in-app token, controlled by Meta. This is similar to other tokens that gamers have been long using. The Zuck token can be a tradable asset or used to purchase things on his various social media platforms.
It's been reported that Meta may create “social tokens,” which could be given to people for their contribution on Facebook. “Creator coins” could be provided to influencers on Instagram to incentivize them to up their game and gain back the audience that TikTok is chipping away from. There may also be various other financial services products launched as well. This may include small business loans and NFTs that could be minted, bought, sold and traded.
This isn’t the first foray into digital assets. All the way back in 2009, Facebook, as it was known at the time, was ahead of its time by starting Facebook Credits to help purchases within online games such as Farmville.
Fairly recently, the social media giant launched Libra, a proposed virtual cryptocurrency. It was immediately met with public skepticism, distrust and regulatory scrutiny. This ultimately led to many of the executives and workers involved with the project to leave the organization. Libra was rebranded as Diem in late 2020, but it didn’t gain traction and was shut down at the beginning of the year.
It's easy and fashionable to deride Zuckerberg, but we shouldn’t write him off. Like him or not, he has proven to be a shrewd businessperson. Unabashedly, he freely clones competing companies or outright buys them out.
Zuckerberg still has a massive war chest at his disposal and several successful social media platforms that generate generous revenue. It will be interesting to watch and see if this new crypto-type asset will take off or become another recent flop.
