About ten months ago, the tech giant Meta decided to join the NFT bandwagon. The CEO of the social networking company, Mark Zuckerberg, confirmed it: both Facebook and Instagram would have what are known as “digital collectible items”. However, the promising novelty has come to an end.
Stephane Kasriel, Meta’s head of trading and financial technologies, has confirmed via a Twitter thread that the company intends to remove its NFT and digital collectibles features on Instagram and Facebook. A change in the company that has left more than one surprised.
NFTs began testing exclusively with select Instagram and Facebook creators, but with some limitations. Two months later, Meta decided to expand this function on Instagram to a greater number of content creators from a hundred countries, something that has not finally come to fruition.
In the Twitter thread, Kasriel states, “We are removing NFTs for now to focus on other ways to support creators, individuals, and businesses.” In this way, the idea that was born to generate a way of income for content creators thanks to the sale of their digital works has ended up being cancelled.
Meta decided to embark on this project to provide some improvement in the work of the creators, promoting the sale of NFTs in their profiles. However, the company would be “increasing its focus” through other projects, since NFTs on Facebook and Instagram have lost relevance in recent months.
Still, Meta has promised to develop other business tools, such as Meta Pay. It is a payment system that would be focused on areas of greatest impact, such as the monetization of Instagram Reels or its tip function called gifts.
“Let me be clear: Creating opportunities for creators and businesses to connect with their fans and monetize remains a top priority, and we’re going to focus on areas where we can make an impact at scale, like messaging and sharing opportunities. monetization for Reels”, Kasriel wrote on his Twitter account.
This news comes months after Meta decided to lay off 11,000 employees, around 13% of its global workforce, carrying out the biggest cut in its history. Today, the company is driving its efforts into the virtual reality metaverse. Zuckerberg himself revealed that he hoped that users could one day coin virtual clothing as NFTs, among other functions.
