McDonald’s is preparing to make a move towards the metaverse. The company has filed ten trademark applications to build a “virtual restaurant featuring actual and virtual goods.”
The trademarks include virtual food and beverages and “downloadable multimedia files containing artwork, text, audio and video files and non-fungible tokens.” The trademarks also include intellectual property for “entertainment services,” which could mean virtual and real-world events and concerts.
One of the trademarks, in particular, mentions the goal of “operating a virtual restaurant featuring actual and virtual goods, operating a virtual restaurant online featuring home delivery.”
This is an ambitious project coming from McDonald’s, but it’s far from the first time the company has dipped its toes in the world of NFTs. In October, the company revealed an NFT to honor the 40th anniversary of the McRib burger. More recently, Mcdonald’s planned an NFT exhibit to celebrate the Lunar New Year.
The company has also promoted its crypto enthusiasm on social media by sparking discussions and engaging in conversations related to crypto, NFTs, and the metaverse on Twitter. “How are you doing people who run crypto twitter accounts?” is one of many tweets that has sparked conversations around McDonald’s involvement in the crypto world.
McDonald’s is far from the only company getting excited to plunge into the metaverse. Companies like Nike, Coca-Cola, Visa, Adidas, Ubisoft, and many more have all embraced NFTs and made public commitments to implement them into their systems and the designs of their products.
By far, the most invested company seems to be Facebook, recently renamed “Meta,” which has gone all-in on a future marked by the metaverse. According to Mark Zuckerberg, they want “to bring the Metaverse to life.”
The craze for NFT doesn’t seem as though it will be stopping anytime soon, which means there will be more public and financial pressure for other companies to jump into the trend or else risk falling behind.
