It's a safe bet few seasoned market-watchers were actually surprised by Facebook's "rebranding" to Meta.
And there are a couple of reasons for that.
The relentless whistleblower revelations over the past few weeks have made the "Facebook" name radioactive to a certain extent, for investors, of course, but also to that all-important user base.
But on a more big-picture level, it was time for Zuckerberg & Co. to take the plunge and tie together its VR and social media offerings, and pave the way for its "metaverse" - a kind of shared virtual reality experience in which individuals and groups can interact with one another in a kind of VR wonderland. That's a really exciting move, and I'll tell you why in a second.
What was surprising was the lightning-fast, triple-digit rise in a really obscure cryptocurrency: Mana. Mana is the "native" token of a metaverse called Decentraland.
On the surface, the takeaway is clear: The speculators out there in the crypto space clearly believe Facebook will leverage or somehow use Mana to grease the economic wheels of its own metaverse.
In this seven-minute clip, I'll tell you what's really going to happen - and where to put your money instead...
So, I'm not a big fan of this particular metaverse token... but cryptocurrency is the ultimate "big tent" asset; the way I see it, for every dud, there could be two or even three outstanding coins. My colleague Tom Gentile just went on the record about a sub-$3 token driving a new crypto tech that makes Bitcoin look like a Buffalo nickel. This token could spark a $30 trillion crypto "mega-boom" over the next ten years, and you ought to get caught up before this thing explodes onto the news...