META shares crash by 20% after Facebook decided to enter into the Metaverse and pause the pursuit of an immediate profit by building the metaverse so let’s read further in our latest cryptocurrency news.

Judging by the drop in stock prices, the investors are not really convinced by Facebook’s plans to enter the metaverse. The META shares crashed by 20% in the aftermath of the trading and after releasing the 2021 Q4 earnings reports. Facebook cited stagnant user growth in the earnings report and it took the eye off the flagship product and shifted to the metaverse where people use digital avatars to interact with virtual and augmented reality headsets so a few blockchain projects compete already to build an open-source metaverse that will be powered by crypto and Web3 technologies.

The drop is the latest in the line of bad news for the company. Last month, the Diem Association led by facebook aimed to govern a global digital currency but decided to sell its assets to Silvergate bank for $200 million and ended the social media giant’s stablecoin ambitions. The project launched in 2019 and faced pressure right away from US senators and regulators. In the early days, the association saw the exit of founding members like Visa, eBay, PayPal, Stripe, and Mastercard.

It never recovered and the project continued to narrow down the vision until it shut down. Through last year it released a crypto wallet Novi which is a new tool that was supposed to hold the Diem coin but only held the Paxos one. The pivot to the metaverse complete with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg rebranded the company to Meta and it also had a bumpy start thanks to the skepticism from both sides of the political spectrum. Many distrust Facebook for the role in misinformation around COVID-19 and allowing the foreign interface in the 2016 US Presidential election. What didn’t help was the claims of verbal and sexual harassment taking place in the Meta virtual space. The reports stated that “on the side of the impression we expect continued headwinds from both increased competition for people’s time and a shift of engagement.”

Facebook announced its huge crypto plan back in 2019 which was a borderless global currency called Libra that was supposed to be backed by a collection of low-volatility assets and currencies from stable and reputable central banks. On the same day, Facebook also announced a wallet called Calibra to hold the Libra stablecoin. Two years later, Facebook rebranded to Meta and Libr to Diem but now it seems that Diem is selling off all its assets.

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• Source: https://www.dcforecasts.com/altcoin-news/meta-shares-crash-by-20-after-facebooks-shift-to-metaverse/