Meta (formerly Facebook) on Wednesday renamed its digital payments platform Facebook Pay as Meta Pay and also launched a digital wallet for the metaverse. This comes a month after the social networking giant had said that metaverse has the potential to unlock more commerce opportunities and it can make entirely new businesses possible.
This is a step by the company towards making payments easier to process within the metaverse.
"Today we're taking the first step by changing Facebook Pay to become Meta Pay. It'll stay the same easy way to shop, send money, and donate to causes you care about on Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, and anywhere else you could use Facebook Pay. But beyond the current features, we're working on something new: a wallet for the metaverse that lets you securely manage your identity, what you own, and how you pay," company CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote on his Facebook page.
"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," Zuckerberg added.
Earlier in May, the company had announced that Facebook Pay is also adopting the Meta branding and it would soon be renamed Meta Pay.
"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. That is, the more places you can easily use your digital goods, the more you'll value them, which creates a bigger market for creators," noted Zuckerberg.
Facebook had launched its payments system to work across its app ecosystem -- Facebook, Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp and named it Facebook Pay in November 2019.