Facebook’s rebranding spiked interest in MANA cryptocurrency

Decentraland’s native digital token of the same name (MANA) reached its all-time high of $4.16 last October 30 according to crypto site CoinMarketCap. This was a 400% increase which happened right after Facebook announced its rebranding to Meta on October 28.

The head of the Asia-Pacific branch of the cryptocurrency exchange Luno, Vijay Ayyar, said in an interview with CNBC that MANA and other metaverse-related cryptos are becoming more accepted by traders because of Facebook’s rebranding. He noted that this can be interpreted as a sign that more people are becoming conscious of the metaverse and will gradually adopt it.

On that note, Facebook’s shift towards the ‘metaverse’ is their way of allowing users to experience a virtual reality where they can interact with one another in a digital realm and see various digital objects.

Apart from the MANA cryptocurrency, digital tokens of blockchain-based games such as Axie Infinity and The Sandbox also increased in the past few days. As based on the data from CoinMarketCap, Axie Infinity (AXS) reached a market price of over $140 as of November 2, 2021. Meanwhile, The Sandbox (SAND) reached over $2.77 on the same day.

MANA is a native digital coin released in 2017 which is utilized for buying and selling virtual land in a metaverse platform, Decentraland. Buying land from this platform is done through nonfungible tokens (NFTs) which is a form of digital asset that is meant to track who owns those specific properties. This runs on the Ethereum blockchain where the second-largest digital token Ether (ETH) is found.

In Decentraland’s published whitepaper, they explained in their rationale that the ‘development of proprietary platforms, such as Facebook, has allowed hundreds of millions of users to gather, interact, share content and play games’. 

However, these said platforms were managed by centralized bodies that ‘extract significant revenue from communities and content creators who drive traffic to the platforms’. Meanwhile, Decentraland is a platform that ‘allows its content creators to own and capture the full value of their contributions’.

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