Remember NFTs? Even Meta doesn’t want to deal with them anymore
In a major development that once again proves the heyday to NFTs has passed, Meta is ending support for the technology on Facebook and Instagram. While NFTs have been around since 2014, they became all the rage during the pandemic, with people buying and selling photos and other digital collectibles for millions of dollars. While sales volume peaked in 2021, things slowed down last year, especially after the spectacular crash of FTX. At the height of the NFT boom, Meta announced plans to allow users to create and trade NFTs on its platforms, but the company has now apparently had a change of heart.
In a tweet, Metas leads trade and fintech Stephane Kasriel said the company is “step down” its support for NFTs on Facebook and Instagram “to focus on other ways to support creators, people and businesses.” Following the decision, Meta will stop testing all NFT mining, trading and sharing activities on both platforms. Instead of NFTs, the company says it will focus on areas that impact a larger number of users, including messaging, Reels monetization, and improving Meta Pay. Kasriel also said that the company will continue to support the NFT creators who use Facebook and Instagram to showcase their work, but did not specify any specific plans regarding that.
Mark Zuckerberg was one of the main champions of Meta’s venture into NFTs over the past year. The company began testing its Digital Collectibles feature on Instagram in May 2022 before opening support for creators to create and sell NFTs on the Polygon blockchain in November. However, in March 2023 the company announced a detailed future roadmap that did not mention NFTs or digital collectibles even once, suggesting that Meta’s love affair with the technology was over.
Meta’s decision is another blow to NFTs, which have seen a significant decline in interest and trading volume over the past year. In accordance Bloomberg report from late last year, the total trading volume in NFTs fell by around 97 percent between January 2022 and September 2022 as part of a larger fall in the crypto sector. According to experts and industry observers, one of the main reasons for the collapse of the NFT market was the lack of a solid foundation to begin with.
While physical works of art by maestros such as Van Gogh and Picasso are highly prized for their finite nature, NFTs are little more than glorified JPEGs that can be easily replicated without distinction between the original and the copies. In such circumstances, it made little sense to pay astronomical sums for images of monkeys (or anything else, for that matter), especially when buyers were not even able to stop others from copying their expensive possessions. While Meta moves away from NFTs may not be a death knell for the technology, it means its halcyon days are over for good.
Source: Stephane Kasriel/TwitterBloomberg
