Instagram’s NFT Business Lasts Seven Months as Meta Winds Down Unit

Quick take:

• Meta’s Head of Trading and Fintech Stephane Kasriel says the company is discontinuing NFTs on Instagram.
• The social media platform will focus on other ways to support creators, people and businesses.
• The announcement comes barely seven months after Instagram rolled out NFTs globally.

Meta has pulled the plug on its digital collectibles business on Instagram barely seven months after going global. The company’s head of commerce and financial technology, Stephane Kasriel, said Monday night that Instagram will wind down its NFT business “to focus on other ways to support creators, people and businesses.”

Make the decision public via a Twitter thread, Kasriel posted: “Some product news: across the company, we’re looking closely at our priorities to increase our focus. We are discontinuing digital collectibles (NFT) for now to focus on other ways to support creators, people and businesses.”

Acknowledging the valuable lessons the company learned from its brief stint in the “Wild West” of NFTs, Kasriel said Meta will look to apply that knowledge to new products it will bring to users on apps and in the metaverse.

However, fans did not take the decision positively, with one Twitter user, Dave Krugman, calling the decision a “short-sighted move.”

“The inclusion of digital collectibles has so much potential to help creators engage their communities and counter the pitfalls of attention-based advertising economies. You stopped before you started. A real shame and undoing a lot of really smart work by great people there,” Dave wrote.

But Kasriel was quick to clarify that the decision was made for the best creators, adding that the company will focus its efforts on monetization opportunities for Reels.

“Let me be clear: Creating opportunities for creators and businesses to connect with fans and monetize remains a priority, and we’re going to focus on areas where we can [an] large-scale impact, such as messaging and monetization [opportunities] for wheels.”

Reels is Instagram’s version of TikTok, a segment of social media that Zuckerberg admitted last year his company was late to tap into.

Meta announced multi-year partnerships with leading web3 service providers, including Coinbase Wallet and Dapper Wallet, allowing Instagram users and creators to pay and receive crypto payments for digital collectibles.

Kasriel said Instagram will “continue to invest in fintech tools that people and businesses will need for the future.”

Meta’s own digital wallet service, Meta Pay, appears to be gaining ground with Kasriel putting it at the center of the company’s plans for streamlining payments.

“We’re streamlining payments with Meta Pay, making withdrawals and withdrawals easier, and investing in messaging payments across Meta.”

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