Meta is shutting off non-fungible tokens amid crypto crash

Meta has announced that the company would be shifting priorities to focus on other ways to support creators, users, and businesses.

Tech giant Meta Platforms Inc. is discontinuing its support for digital collectibles or non-fungible tokens (NFTs) on its platforms less than a year after rolling it out, as the crypto market continues to spiral.

The announcement of the wind down on digital collectibles was made by Stephane Kasriel, Head Of Commerce & Financial Technologies, Meta. The use case applications that can be used for other products will continue to be functional to support for creators, people, and businesses on our apps, both today and in the metaverse.

Kasriel mentioned, "Creating opportunities for creators and businesses to connect with their fans and monetize remains a priority, and we're going to focus on areas where we can make impact at scale, such as messaging and monetization opps for Reels."

Also Read: After Twitter Blue, Meta launches subscription service

Financial tools continue to be a key focus and the company is also streamlining payments with Meta Pay, in an attempt to make checkout & payouts easier, and also investing in messaging payments across platforms.

Digital collectibles were first spotted testing in the pre-beta phase in June 2021. In May 2022, Adam Mosseri, Head Of Instagram officially announced the initial testing of NFTs starting the same week. A select number of users had the ability to share NFTs that they have made or bought. Which they were able to share on either their main feed, Stories or DMs. Additionally, there was no fees to be associated with posting or sharing a digital collectible on the app. Eventually, the feature was rolled out on a larger scale.

It intended to help creators make a living doing what they love. With the step Instagram initiated, a subset of creators stood to benefit and it is about to change with the new update.