Less than a year after pushing its platform to promote digital collectibles, Meta is reducing its support for NFTs on Facebook and Instagram.
This comes after the social network terminated hundreds of employees and a handful of initiatives during what Mark Zuckerberg called the company's "year of efficiency," Engadget writes.
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Stephane Kasriel, the director of commerce and financial technologies at Meta, has announced the move via a post on his Twitter account.
"We learned a ton that we'll be able to apply to products we're continuing to build to support creators, people, and businesses on our apps, both today and in the metaverse," Kasriel tweets.
The change was made almost exactly a year after Zuckerberg said Instagram was developing NFT support on the SXSW stage, which debuted in May of last year.
"I would hope that you know, the clothing that your avatar is wearing in the metaverse, you know, can be basically minted as an NFT and you can take it between your different places," he said.
Tech Crunch notes that only a small group of Instagram creators and a few Facebook users were involved in this short-lived product's testing as of last May.
As the business unveiled intentions to enable creators to mint and sell the artifacts directly on Instagram in November, it revealed plans for another substantial expansion of the function.
Kasriel gave no further explanation as to why Meta was changing its position on NFTs, which Zuckerberg had hinted would be important to the company's goals for the metaverse.
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While it struggles to turn its ambitions of the metaverse into a (virtual) reality, Meta has been reducing costs across the company.
Aside from cutting support for NFTs, it can be remembered that last year, Meta also shut down Novi, their cryptocurrency wallet, which had reportedly planned to handle NFT in the past.
In addition to that, the company has also canceled projects related to Reality Labs, its metaverse subsidiary, and its initiative to reward Reels creators with bonuses.
Reality Labs, a Meta branch that develops AR and VR products, suffered a $13.7 billion loss in 2017, Tech Crunch says.
The excitement surrounding NFTs has also greatly subsided as Meta weathers this storm, since it can intersect with Meta's plans with virtual reality.
Still, other businesses are racing into a market that crashed in 2022 and lost billions of dollars in value following stratospheric levels of excitement in early 2021 while Meta departed NFTs.
Reddit continues to advertise its "digital collectible" avatars that are NFTs, despite the fall of crypto caused by the FTX collapse.
Starbucks recently sold out of a selection of 2,000 $100 NFTs in its Odyssey customer loyalty program, and Sesame Street has just announced an NFT cooperation.
To establish ownership of distinctive digital or physical goods like art, music, or even a tweet, a blockchain-based mechanism called an NFT, or nonfungible token, is employed.
In 2021, NFTs started to proliferate all over, with some of them selling for hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars, CNet details.
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