A smartphone with Fb’s brand is seen in entrance of displayed Fb’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 value spike over the weekend amid pleasure over Facebook’s rebrand.
The value of mana hit an all-time excessive of $4.16 on Saturday night, in response to CoinMarketCap knowledge, up 400% from the place it was buying and selling shortly after Fb introduced it was changing its name to Meta. It has fallen since, having final modified palms at round $3.16.
Fb’s rebrand was geared toward shifting the embattled social media firm’s focus towards the “metaverse,” a sort of shared digital actuality through 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 buy and promote digital properties. Possession of the land is bought by means of non-fungible tokens, a sort 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 change Luno, mentioned mana and different metaverse-focused cryptocurrencies have been rallying on the again of Fb’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 critical flip by way of reaching mainstream consciousness and — quickly — adoption,” Ayyar mentioned.
Different cryptocurrencies, together with the tokens of blockchain-based video games Axie Infinity and The Sandbox, have additionally seen strong beneficial properties the previous few days.
Traders wish to smaller different 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 response to Luno’s Ayyar.
“Usually, as soon as Bitcoin crosses an all-time excessive, we see cash circulate into different altcoins,” he mentioned.
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.
