The senior representatives of Meta announced that the firm will be discontinuing the ability to buy and trade non-fungible tokens (NFTs) on both Facebook and Instagram, which has only stayed around for less than a year since its launch.
Meta’s head of commerce and financial technologies Stephane Kasriel tweeted: “We’re winding down digital collectibles (NFTs) for now to focus on other ways to support creators, people, and businesses.”
Kasriel also mentioned that the major social media company would keep funding the launch of “fintech tools that people and businesses will need for the future”. He stated that they are expediting payments with Meta Pay, streamlining checkout and payouts, and investing in messaging payments.
Kasriel made it clear that Meta is still making a priority to enable creators and businesses to connect with their fans and monetize, adding that they are about to shift their focus to areas like messaging and monetization opps for Reels.
This decision was met with backlash from the community, however. One of the detractors, photographer and founder of the creative community Allships Dave Krugman, tweeted that Meta is giving up too soon and that the “inclusion of digital collectibles has so much potential to help creators engage their communities and counterbalance the pitfalls of attention based advertising economies.”
Matthew Ferrick, the creative lead at Nifty Gateway, criticised Instagram for choosing to side with advertisers instead of helping the artists make money on the platform as it is deemed more profitable to do so.
Last July, Meta started Facebook’s support for digital collectibles, first restricting it to a small number of creators and to the United States alone.
