We’re upgrading our NFT news update to feature everything Web 3.0, and this week we’ve got a bumper crop of stories to sift through, with Disney, Microsoft, Twitter and Meta all making headlines. Let’s see who rose to the top and who sank to the bottom.
Meta Chucks $3 Billion into Metaverse Black Hole
Meta revealed this week that it lost $3 billion in the last quarter alone as part of its nightmarish metaverse venture. The almost universally hated tech monolith, which has placed a lot of eggs in its metaverse basket, expects to make more losses in the next quarter until it can start to stem the tide, with very few revenue sources making themselves available.
Much was made of the billions of dollars Meta spent just on giving its avatars legs, which tells you all you need to know about the state of its development right now. And it ain’t good.
Disney and Microsoft Won’t be Going Into the Metaverse
Disney and Microsoft took it in turns to pan the current state of the metaverse, showing much more interest in concepts like augmented reality. Speaking at WSJ Tech Live, execs from both companies said that at present the metaverse is simply nothing worth paying attention to – Microsoft gaming head Phil Spencer said that the virtual worlds created so far look like a “meeting room”, while Disney’s CEO Bob Chapek said that it was currently best classified as “next-generation storytelling” and that the very term ‘metaverse’ was still unclear.
This comes on the back of Apple CEO Tim Cook saying that Apple was much more focused on other tech like Augmented Reality than the metaverse.
Ouch.
Twitter Enables NFT Trading Through Tweets
Fresh from allowing certain users to use NFTs as profile pictures, Twitter has now announced that users will be able to initialise NFT trades on the platform. Elon Musk’s new $44 billion plaything has linked up with four NFT exchanges (not including Opensea, shock!) to allow traders to show their NFTs and allow them to bid on others’.
Twitter Tiles will be open to a select few beta testers, before, assuming Musk doesn’t ditch the concept, it will be opened up to the masses.
