Meta wants to bring web3, metaverse virtually into all its future products

• Meta has filed for eight trademarks with the USPTO, of which six are about cryptocurrencies and the metaverse.
• The company is also working on bringing NFTs to Instagram and Facebook.
• Meta is also designing advertising for the metaverse and working on e-wallets.

Meta, formerly Facebook, may have shut down its cryptocurrency aspirations, but the company is serious about moving all of its platform to the web3 world. According to filings with the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), the company has filed eight new trademark applications to attach its logo to various web3 related projects, including cryptocurrencies and the metaverse.

Six of the filings explicitly mention cryptos, metaverse, or blockchain. They suggest that Facebook is looking to bring online social networking and dating services that will facilitate “networking between cryptocurrency investors.” The company is also working on ways to bring “entertainment and electronic publishing services” within virtual reality, telecommunication services for electronic assets held on its platform, financial transaction processing services relating to tokens, blockchain assets, cryptocurrencies, and other virtual assets.

Further, the company is also preparing its biggest revenue generator — advertising services — for web3 and the metaverse. One of the filings numbered 97320144, is about designing advertising services via virtual or augmented reality networks and the metaverse. E-wallets, wearables for virtual reality video games, and the development of computer hardware and software for web3 are also mentioned in the filings.

Meta and web3

To be sure, the filings do not come as a surprise. Meta has already announced plans to bring non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, to the Instagram and Facebook platforms. Both Adam Mosseri, who leads Instagram, and Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg have confirmed such plans.

“We’re working on bringing NFTs to Instagram in the near term,” Zuckerberg said at the South by Southwest conference earlier this month. Neither Mosseri nor Zuckerberg have detailed how NFTs will work on the platform, though Twitter’s implementation of NFT profile pictures and plans to authenticate NFTs could be an example of how the technology will work on Instagram and Facebook.

"Nothing to announce yet, but we are definitely actively exploring NFTs and how we can make them more accessible to a wider audience," Mosseri said in an Instagram story in December 2021.

The company is also continuing its work with blockchain-based payments, despite shutting down its crypto project, called Diem, last month. In its annual 10-K filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) last month, the company said that its Novi digital wallet could use “blockchain-based assets” like stablecoin USDP in the future.

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