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Facebook paid $60million to a bank in South Dakota called Meta Financial Group to secure the name rights for its 'metaverse' rebrand, a regulatory filing has revealed.

The Silicon Valley giant is banking on the Meta name as it seeks to market its new virtual reality world which it believes is the future of the internet. 

Meta Financial said in regulatory filing on Monday that a Delaware company called Beige Key LLC agreed earlier this year to acquire the worldwide rights to its company names for $60 million in cash. It did not disclose who the owner of Beige Key was.

A Meta Platforms (Facebook) spokesman later confirmed: 'Beige Key is affiliated with us and we have acquired these trademark assets.' 

The 'metaverse' is a set of virtual spaces where you can game, work and communicate with other people who aren't in the same physical space as you (pictured: CEO Mark Zuckerberg shows off his avatar in a space suit in the metaverse)

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is seen fencing in the 'Metaverse' with an Olympic gold medal fencer during a live-streamed virtual and augmented reality conference to announce the rebrand of Facebook as Meta, in this screen grab taken from a video released October 28

As well as offering products through its MetaBank subsidiary including consumer savings, loans and credit cards, and commercial lending, Meta Financial partners with institutions including government agencies and financial technology firms to offer banking services with the aim of bolstering financial inclusion.

Facebook said in October its parent company had changed its name to Meta Platforms.

The tech giant, which has invested heavily in virtual reality and augmented reality, sees the metaverse as the successor to the mobile internet.

Last week, Meta Platforms opened up its previously invite-only Horizon Worlds app, where users of its Quest virtual reality headsets can play games and interact as avatars, to over-18 users in the United States and Canada.

The metaverse concept, which has cropped up on several Silicon Valley companies' earnings calls and which will require cooperation among tech giants, could be more than a decade away from being fully realized.

The concept is a set of virtual spaces where you can game, work and communicate with other people who aren't in the same physical space as you.

Facebook explained: 'You'll be able to hang out with friends, work, play, learn, shop, create and more.

'It's not necessarily about spending more time online — it's about making the time you do spend online more meaningful.'

While Facebook is leading the charge with the metaverse, it explained that it isn't a single product one company can build alone.

'Just like the internet, the metaverse exists whether Facebook is there or not,' it added. 

Zuckerberg announced in October that Facebook was changing its name to Meta

'And it won't be built overnight. Many of these products will only be fully realized in the next 10-15 years.' 

A Meta Platforms spokesman confirmed the company was engaged in discussions with Meta Financial before Facebook's name change was announced.

In the filing, Meta Financial said it had embarked on a brand strategy review earlier this year, but the MetaBank spokesperson declined to comment on the negotiations beyond the contents of the filing.

Meta Financial's shares were trading 1.5% lower in mid-afternoon trading, giving it a market capitalization of around $1.74 billion. Meta Platforms was up 1.6%, valuing it at $933 billion.

Artist whose Instagram handle was 'Metaverse' for nine years had her account DISABLED days after Facebook announced its name change to Meta

By Sam Tonkin for MailOnline 

An artist whose Instagram handle was 'Metaverse' for almost a decade had her account disabled days after Facebook announced its name change to Meta, it has emerged.

Australian Thea-Mai Bauman created the account in 2012 to document her life studying fine art in Brisbane, as well as her trips to Shanghai, where she built an augmented reality firm called Metaverse Makeovers.

She used the handle @metaverse alongside her creative work and had fewer than 1,000 followers when Instagram's parent company, Facebook, announced at the end of October that it was changing its name to Meta.

Artist Thea-Mai Bauman, whose Instagram handle was 'Metaverse' for almost a decade, had her account disabled days after Facebook announced its name change to Meta, it has emerged

Five days later, and having received messages from strangers offering to buy her Instagram handle, as well as one saying: 'fb isn't gonna buy it, they're gonna take it', Bauman found that her account had been disabled.

A message on the screen read: 'Your account has been blocked for pretending to be someone else'.

'This account is a decade of my life and work. I didn't want my contribution to the metaverse to be wiped from the internet,' Baumann told the New York Times. 

Facebook rebranded its parent company in October and now goes by the name Meta.

Meta refers to the 'metaverse', CEO Mark Zuckerberg's vision for the company's transition into shared augmented reality, where users work and play in virtual world environments. 

The announcement was made as Zuckerberg tried to distance the social media behemoth from mounting scandals after leaked whistleblower documents claimed its platforms harmed users and stoked anger.  

But Baumann's treatment has further enraged critics, some of whom said it illustrated the power and control Meta wields over individual user accounts with its various policies and algorithms. 

'Facebook has essentially unfettered discretion to appropriate people's Instagram user names,' Rebecca Giblin, director of the Intellectual Property Research Institute of Australia at the University of Melbourne, told the New York Times.

Bauman (pictured) used the handle @metaverse and had fewer than 1,000 followers when Facebook announced at the end of October that it was changing its name to Meta

She added that 'the @metaverse example highlights the breadth of this power' and that under Facebook's policies, users 'essentially have no rights'. 

Baumann's account was finally restored a month after she first appealed to Instagram.

A spokesman for the social media giant said it had been 'incorrectly removed for impersonation', adding: 'We're sorry this error occurred'.

No explanation was given as to why it had been flagged for impersonation.

Instagram also refused to answer further questions about whether it was disabled because the account was linked to Facebook's rebranding.