Meta winds down support for non-fungible tokens (NFT) on Instagram and Facebook to focus on the payment platform Meta Pay, which will support cryptocurrencies.
Meta Corporation is discontinuing support for NFT on Instagram and Facebook social platforms. Stephane Kasriel, Meta’s Head of Commerce and FinTech, announced that the company “will focus on other ways to support creators, people, and businesses.”
Meta plans to focus on messaging tools and content monetization. In particular, the company intends to optimize payments with Meta Pay, simplify deposit and withdrawal processes, as well as develop payments through messaging.
To recap, in May 2022, Meta filed several applications to use Meta Pay as an “online social networking service for investors” with the ability to perform financial transactions with any type of digital assets, including cryptocurrencies. And two months later, the Novi cryptocurrency wallet project was officially shut down.
The NFT support on Instagram in test mode started in May 2022. A month later, Facebook users also got the opportunity to use NFT, and in August, the total number of countries where this kind of function was available grew to 100. In November, Meta announced a new tool for Instagram, which was supposed to allow the creation and sale of NFT directly on the platform.
The community did not appreciate Meta’s decision to stop supporting NFT on Instagram and Facebook. For example, crypto artist Dave Krugman called the corporation’s decision short-sighted. A similar opinion was expressed by podcaster Marc Colser, noting that users lack “some transparency as to why this decision was made.”
However, according to some experts, the refusal of Meta to further support the tools to work with NFT is for the redistribution of resources for further developments in the field of Metaverse. Recall, Mark Zuckerberg decided to continue funding Reality Labs as part of a global strategy for the development of Metaverse technology, despite the $ 13.7 billion loss in 2022. Moreover, according to Zuckerberg, which was cited in the Meta Platforms financial report, “Reality Labs’ losses will increase in 2023.”
