Facebook, Mastercard, and Adobe Integrate With Blockchain and Metaverse

In its early days, institutional bodies regarded Bitcoin as an unsustainable asset coveted by criminals. In the intervening decade since its development, the tables seem to have turned, and more firms are beginning to find new avenues and ways to get involved with digital assets.

In 2021, NFTs, the Metaverse, and GameFi seem to have taken center stage in this development. With blockchain technology offering a glimpse of the future for humanity, many institutions are hoping to position themselves appropriately to ensure they dont miss out. This has resulted in inflows of over $17 billion into space in 2021 alone.

Increasing Crypto Opportunities For Big Players

Due in part to Bitcoins price appreciation, there is now a growing list of large investors seeking to add this asset class to their balance sheet. This has caused a domino effect as other financial institutions are also looking to capitalize on the increasing user adoption of cryptocurrency.

The recent approval of a US Bitcoin ETF and its subsequent debut on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) has presented another avenue for these institutional investors to partake in Bitcoin. Since it started trading a week ago, CoinShares has reported a staggering $1.47 billion inflow of new money into cryptocurrency funds, the highest level on record. This has brought the year to date total to around $8 billion. As seen in the chart above, Bitcoin has also witnessed 10 consecutive weeks of inflows, signalling more institutional investments are entering the space.

Mastercard To Bring Crypto Payment Rails To Merchants

One of the firms looking to get involved in crypto is renowned payment company Mastercard, which has announced the incorporation of crypto products offered by its partners. Mastercard is set to partner with crypto firm Bakkt, responsible for providing custodial services for this initiative.

With a global user base of over $2.5 billion, Mastercard processes payments for users and partner financial institutions numbering over 20,000 globally. The company has now joined payment rival Visa, which took a step further by delving into NFTs.

Business Adoption Grows For NFTs and TheMetaverse

Facebook has annouced plans to invest $10 billion into its metaverse division. Facebook Reality Labs is tasked with developing AR and VR hardware, software, and content for the metaverse.

Facebook appears to be making progress on its plans to pivot into a metaverse company, as suggested by its CEO Mark Zuckerberg. The company has said that the Metaverse may be 10 to 15 years away from being a reality, but its latest investment would most likely fastrack developments in that area. If Facebook were to continue its current levels of investment into the Metaverse for its projected timeline, then total investment could total over $100 billion for development costs alone.

Furthermore, Adobe is to release a new feature to help verify and protect digital content created on its creative cloud solutions. The NFT based Content Credential service will allow Photoshop and Adobe service users to link their social media profiles and crypto wallets to their work to prove ownership and the authenticity of their work.

This is in line with its Content Authenticity initiative, which Adobe co-founded two years ago alongside Microsoft, BBC, Nikkon, and Getty Images to address misinformation through digital content provenance. The development could be set to have far-reaching consequences on the digital content space as it opens up the possibilities of digital content verification using metadata for changing how intellectual property law is understood and enforced.

Adobe has partnered with several NFT marketplaces, including OpeaSea, KnownOrigin and SuperRare. Rarible also announced its partnership with Adobe signalling its intentions to help fight against misinformation by using attribution and verifiable truth of the content. Continent creators can, however, choose to be pseudo-anonymous by providing links to their crypto wallets and social media pages.

Rarible is the ninth-largest NFT marketplace by daily trade volume, according to DappRadar data. However, since peaking at $2.5 million in April, the platforms transaction volume has dropped significantly. OpenSea, on the other hand, has a volume of more than $58 million, considerably exceeding the rest of the NFT marketplaces.