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Mark Zuckerberg Affirms Meta's Unwavering Commitment to the Metaverse

Meta (META) remains committed to the metaverse, even after a highly visible shift towards artificial intelligence.

“Our investments in AI continue. We remain fully committed to the Metaverse vision as well. We've been working on both of these two major priorities for many years in parallel now, and in many ways the two areas are overlapping and complementary,” Mark Zuckerberg said in an earnings call.

The social media giant's emphasis on the metaverse has proven to be financially challenging, leading to significant losses. In 2022, Meta's Facebook Reality Labs (FRL) division, responsible for developing the metaverse, incurred a staggering loss of $13.7 billion, despite generating $2.2 billion in revenue. This marked an increase in losses compared to the previous year, where they lost $10.2 billion on revenue of $2.3 billion in 2021.

"This is an ambitious long-term horizon, multi-faceted roadmap. There are lots of components to the Reality Labs portfolio across VR, AR, Metaverse, social platforms, neural interfaces, and we really have a long-term time horizon for evaluating the return on our investments here," Zuckerberg continued. “I can't guarantee you that I'm going to be right about this bet. I do think that this is the direction that the world is going in.”

In its latest financial results, Meta disclosed a fiscal second-quarter net income of $7.79 billion, indicating significant growth compared to the previous year's $6.7 billion. Moreover, the company's revenue surged by 11% to reach an impressive $32 billion.

Facebook and Meta's suite of apps, which includes Instagram, witnessed a 5% and 7% surge in daily active users, respectively. However, Meta's Threads app, which was intended to replace Twitter, suffered a significant setback, experiencing a sharp 60% decline in active users since its initial launch week, as reported by Similarweb.

The stock soared more than 1% on Wednesday, closing at $294.47, and experienced further gains during after-hours trading, reaching nearly $319.