Social platform giant, Meta is removing the Non Fungible Tokens offering from its products, namely Facebook and Instagram; after around 10 months since its inception. The Head of commerce and financial technologies at Meta, Stephane Kasriel, took to Twitter on March 13, 2023 and stated that the organisation is dialling down on the NFT support to “focus on other ways to support creators, people, and businesses.”
Some product news: across the company, we’re looking closely at what we prioritize to increase our focus. We’re winding down digital collectibles (NFTs) for now to focus on other ways to support creators, people, and businesses. 🧵[1/5]
— Stephane Kasriel (@skasriel) March 13, 2023
Stating that, Kasriel also added that the firm is still working on prioritizing ways for users to keep being connected with their fans and monetize. While doing that, the platform will also be focusing on creating tools which will be helping in building payment rails on its platform and via its messaging apps. All of that also comes with monetization of Reels, which is a feature that uses the short-form videos featured on both Facebook and Instagram.
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Kasriel particularly mentioned about a focus on Meta Pay, which is the firm’s payment platform. This new feature in the future might be able to support crypto as per the trademark filings from May that included five applications for its namesake, which will be used in a platform called Meta Pay.
Meta Platforms Inc. (i.e. Facebook) has filed 5 new trademark applications for:
“META PAY”
The filings indicate that @Meta plans to launch a payment platform called “META PAY” for users to exchange old-fashioned regular money and cryptocurrencies.#Meta $FB#Metaverse pic.twitter.com/W2ObxgAWfl
— Josh Gerben (@JoshGerben) May 18, 2022
Though the innovations are lined up one after another, the NFT service from Meta was pretty short lived as the Instagram offering for NFTs began in May 2022, before the expansion took over Facebook back in June 2022.
Let me be clear: 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. [4/5]
— Stephane Kasriel (@skasriel) March 13, 2023
The launching of the NFT feature on Instagram came with an “end-to-end toolkit” for minting and trading NFTs within Instagram, as the feature expanded to over 100 countries. Soon the understandable backlash from the NFT community came for Meta along with scathing criticism from the crypto community. NFT artist Dave Krugman tweeted:
Such a short sighted move. Inclusion of digital collectibles has so much potential to help creators engage their communities and counterbalance the pitfalls of attention based advertising economies. You guys quit before you even started. A real shame and undoing a lot of really… https://t.co/eC9hl9cWsw
— Dave💧💧💧 (@dave_krugman) March 13, 2023
He also added, “The trust earned over the past year is now squandered.”
The co-founder of Earth Labs, a Web3 firm, Allen Hena, was more direct with his feedback, as he stated that Meta scrapped the idea as it “realized that using public crypto networks means you can’t exploit creators.”
Some product news: across the company, we’re looking closely at what we prioritize to increase our focus. We’re winding down digital collectibles (NFTs) for now to focus on other ways to support creators, people, and businesses. 🧵[1/5]
— Stephane Kasriel (@skasriel) March 13, 2023
Additional Read: First Bitcoin NFT Project rom BAYC
Source: Cointegepraph
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