Facebook reverses digital currency ad ban following metaverse, NFT push

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Facebook made headlines recently when it announced it was officially changing its company name to Meta. The move signaled that the world’s largest social networking company has fully bought into the ideas of web 3.0 and the metaverse.

Now, Facebook has reversed a previous ban on ads related to digital currencies, NFTs, and more. While advertisers will still have to apply to run digital currency ads, Facebook has stated it wants to “make it easier” to do so.

More about Facebook’s move to reverse the digital currency ad ban

Facebook previously banned ads promoting digital currencies due to regulatory uncertainty and the questionable legality of various digital assets. In a statement linked to the reversal of this ban, Facebook laid out its reasons:

• It stated that it expanded the number of regulatory licenses it would accept, making running ads about digital currencies easier. Facebook will now accept regulatory licenses from 27 jurisdictions rather than the three it previously accepted.
• Facebook feels that the industry has “continued to mature and stabilize” and noted the regulatory clarity seen in recent years.
• The social media giant said that going forward, it would move away from the “variety of signals” it had previously used to determine eligibility to run ads and would now accept any of the 27 regulatory licenses.

According to Facebook’s updated policy page, ads promoting the following will still require prior written approval.

• Exchanges and trading platforms
• Services that facilitate digital currency lending or borrowing
• Wallets that allow buying, selling, and swapping of tokens
• Hardware or software for digital currency mining

Whereas ads that promote the following are now allowed by licensed entities:

• Tax services for digital currencies
• Events, education, and news related to digital currencies
• Blockchain industry news
• Services and products that are not virtual currencies, e.g. NFTs
• Wallets that allow storing but don’t allow buying, selling, or swapping

Facebook will allow advertisers for the above categories, which have licenses from countries including: Australia, Austria, Canada, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Japan, Luxembourg, Malaysia, Malta, Netherland, Norway, Philippines, Singapore, South Korea, Sweden, Thailand, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom, and United States.

In other words, Facebook has made moves towards promoting education and information related to the digital currency and blockchain industries without embracing the direct sales of worthless tokens and potentially illegal securities.

The web 3.0 and metaverse memes

Ideas surrounding web 3.0 and the metaverse began to take off in the last couple of years and have reached a fever pitch in the last six months. The idea is that humans live in a virtual world where most of our interactions are digital and where we can own digital assets, use digital currencies, and live, play, and interact in virtual reality.

The reality is that today’s technology is nowhere near ready to bring out the dystopian implications of a virtual world. While VR headsets are getting more affordable and fewer people are puking due to motion sickness after using them, most of the technology in the blockchain sector that’s touted as facilitating this world is hyped-up vaporware.

Take Ethereum, for example. It’s widely promoted by proponents of web 3.0, yet it can’t even handle the transactions of a single blockchain casino app. Then we have Solana, which developers had to shut off and restart when it caved under the pressure of too many transactions. These darlings of the web 3.0 movements are simply not going to make it because they don’t scale, and they likely never will despite repeated promises.

Enter the Metanet

Does this mean that all the talk of web 3.0 and the metaverse is hype and bunk? While much of it is, there is actually a revolution taking place that will change the internet forever. Still, it’s one that entities like Facebook won’t be too keen to promote or educate on because it will make their business model obsolete.

The real web 3.0 is one fueled by micropayments rather than data harvesting and advertising. It’s called Metanet, and if Satoshi Nakamoto has his way, it will eventually replace the internet as we know it. Everything will be fueled by micropayments worth fractions of a cent, new businesses and ways of doing things will open up, annoying ads and cookie notifications will disappear forever, and spam/scams will become economically unviable.

While Facebook has taken reasonable measures to allow ads that won’t directly promote scam tokens and illegal securities, they’d better embrace the future and allow education on the real revolution: the Metanet on BSV blockchain.

Read more about the promise of Metanet here.

Watch: CoinGeek New York presentation, AR & VR & the Metaverse on Blockchain