Nick Clegg, vice president for global affairs and communications at Meta Platforms, hinted at the company’s huge intentions.
Meta, the newly renamed Facebook, is preparing to provide cryptocurrency payments through its social messaging programme Whatsapp via the Novi cryptocurrency wallet. Trials for the same have already started at the social media behemoth.
NOVI CEO Stephane Kasriel revealed on Twitter that the pilot programme has been running for about six weeks, with a small group of individuals evaluating the Whatsapp payment’s features and services.
As he stated: “Since launching the Novi pilot six weeks ago, we’ve been able to test and learn which features and functionality are most essential to users and concentrate our efforts on improving them.”
This is the first significant step forward for Meta in terms of increasing its digital wallet footprint after the rebranding. Facebook’s crypto ambitions started in 2019 with the announcement of Libra, a global stablecoin. However, the crypto enterprise never got off the ground due to a series of regulatory roadblocks and was forced to shut down.
Facebook has not abandoned its crypto ambitions and is now rebranding to make an effect on the fledgling metaverse ecosystem. On the side, it built the Novi wallet, which will now play a critical part in its payment plans.
Meta is significantly late to the cryptocurrency payment sector, which it has been attempting to penetrate for a long period of time. However, this will not be its first foray into the digital payment sector; before, it established a messenger payment sector but quickly shut it down due to low adoption.
The new crypto payment initiative using Whatsapp might pave the way for Meta in the digital payment space, since Whatsapp is one of the most popular social messaging systems on the planet, with over a billion subscribers.
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