Meta ‘Winding Down’ Instagram NFT support to focus on creators

Barely a year after announcing plans to allow the sharing of digital collectibles on its Instagram platform, Meta is putting the project on hold.

Meta Commerce and Fintech head Stephane Kasriel announced the change on Twitter. The tech and social media giant is winding down its digital collectibles initiative “to focus on other ways to support creators, people and businesses,” Kasriel wrote.

Last year, Meta made a big push into digital collectibles after Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Instagram’s parent company Meta, announced that non-fungible tokens — better known as NFTs — would be coming to the photo and video sharing app at the South by Southwest conference in Austin . The features were only made available to a select group of creators and were never widely released.

In August, to make sharing NFTs easier, Meta added Ethereum, Polygon and Flow NFT cross-posting between its Facebook and Instagram products.

In November, Meta had also added the integration of a decentralized storage protocol, Arweave, to the platform.

Now, one year after the first teasing of the project, Meta is moving away from NFTs.

“We learned a ton that we’ll be able to apply to products we continue to build to support creators, people and businesses on our apps, both today and in the metaverse,” Kasriel wrote, adding that the company will continue to invest in fintech tools that facing consumers and businesses.

Between October 2021, when Facebook changed its name to Meta, and December 2022, the price of Meta’s stock fell 60% from $323.57 to $114.74. The stock recovered somewhat in Q1 2023 and is currently priced at $180.90, according to MarketWatch.

“We learned a ton that we’ll be able to apply to products we continue to build to support creators, people and businesses on our apps, both today and in the metaverse,” said Kasriel.

Kasriel thanked the partners who helped develop NFTs on Instagram.

“Proud of the relationships we built,” he said. “And look forward to supporting the many NFT creators who continue to use Instagram and Facebook to amplify their work.”