What happened

Meta Platforms (META -0.59%) had a forgettable Thursday, with its stock trading down slightly against the 0.4% rise of the S&P 500 index. Not for the first time, the social media giant's digital currency plans were met with a big collective shrug from investors.

So what

The Financial Times reported that a specialist unit of Meta Platforms has devised plans for digital coins and loan services. These would presumably be offered to the company's massive user base.

Person at a laptop pinching their nose in frustration.

Image source: Getty Images.

Citing "several people familiar with the efforts," the article said that the unit, Meta Financial Technologies, aims to anchor this next-generation financial ecosystem with a virtual currency to be used in the company's metaverse. Meta Platforms employees informally call the currency "Zuck Bucks," after the founder/CEO, Mark Zuckerberg.

In all likelihood the Zuck Buck would not, strictly speaking, be a cryptocurrency. Instead, the idea seems to be that it would function as a proprietary in-app token, akin to the Robux used for transactions in the games in the Roblox ecosystem.

The article cited "company memos and people close to the plans," as saying that "social tokens" or "reputation tokens" could also be awarded to users for various types of Facebook postings. Ditto for "creator coins" minted for influencers on the company's popular photo-sharing site Instagram.

Now what

The combination of the terms "Meta Platforms," and "digital currency" surely bring back uncomfortable memories for the company's investors. In 2019, while still officially called Facebook, the company announced the development of its Libra stablecoin (later renamed to Diem). But regulatory resistance and the departure of partners from the project, among other issues, eventually led it to scrap those ambitious plans.

As a result, there's a distinct lack of confidence in the company's ability to pull off a complicated fintech project. Many investors are probably thinking that Meta Platforms can figure out more effective ways of making a (non-Zuck) buck.