A smartphone with Facebook’s brand is seen in entrance of displayed Facebook’s new rebrand brand Meta on this illustration taken October 28, 2021.
Dado Ruvic | Reuters
Mana, a little-known cryptocurrency used for purchasing and promoting digital land, noticed its worth spike over the weekend amid pleasure over Facebook’s rebrand.
The worth of mana hit an all-time excessive of $4.16 on Saturday night, in keeping with CoinMarketCap knowledge, up 400% from the place it was buying and selling shortly after Facebook introduced it was changing its name to Meta. It has fallen since, having final modified palms at round $3.16.
Facebook’s rebrand was aimed toward shifting the embattled social media firm’s focus towards the “metaverse,” a sort of shared digital actuality by which a number of customers can work together with one another and digital objects.
Launched in 2017, mana is the native digital token of Decentraland, a self-proclaimed metaverse platform the place customers should purchase and promote digital properties. Possession of the land is bought by non-fungible tokens, a kind of digital asset meant to trace who owns what. It runs on Ethereum, the blockchain community behind ether, the world’s second-largest digital foreign money.
Vijay Ayyar, head of Asia Pacific at cryptocurrency alternate Luno, stated mana and different metaverse-focused cryptocurrencies have been rallying on the again of Facebook’s rebrand, which is being seen as an indication of rising acceptance of the metaverse pattern.
“I learn it as an interpretation of a vote of confidence amongst each speculators and traders that this idea of a metaverse is now taking a severe flip when it comes to reaching mainstream consciousness and — quickly — adoption,” Ayyar stated.
Different cryptocurrencies, together with the tokens of blockchain-based video games Axie Infinity and The Sandbox, have additionally seen strong features the previous few days.
Traders need to smaller various cryptocurrencies, or “altcoins,” as curiosity in bitcoin has begun to peter out after the world’s largest digital coin hit a record high of nearly $67,000 final month, in keeping with Luno’s Ayyar.
“Usually, as soon as Bitcoin crosses an all-time excessive, we see cash circulation into different altcoins,” he stated.
Final week, shiba inu — a “meme token” difficult dogecoin — rallied sharply amid hypothesis over whether or not Robinhood might add the coin to its buying and selling platform. It now ranks forward of dogecoin, with a market capitalization of over $39.6 billion.
