Meta has officially stopped supporting NFT on Facebook and Instagram, less than a year after adopting digital collection (NFT) on its platform.
According to Engadget, the new update was released by Meta after the company laid off thousands of employees and closed many projects as CEO Mark Zuckerberg headed for a more productive year for the company.
In the new strategy, Meta will stop producing NFTs to focus on other ways to support creators, individual users, and businesses, both in the mainstream and the metaverse. Besides, Meta will also focus on making money for Reels and paying via messages on Meta.
The update comes almost exactly a year after Zuckerberg took to the SXSW stage to announce that Instagram is planning to support NFT. The company also announced another significant expansion of this feature in November 2022 when it revealed plans to let creators mint and sell NFTs directly on Instagram.
It remains unclear why Meta reversed course in relation to the NFT, which Zuckerberg said could play a role in the company’s metaverse plan. At SXSW 2022, the Meta leader hopes people can know that the clothes the avatar wears in the metaverse is a product of the NFT and that people can bring it to different places in the metaverse space.
In fact, discontinuing NFT support is not the only setback that Meta has outlined recently as it also shut down its e-wallet service, which was rumored to support NFT. The company has also cut projects in its metaverse division, Reality Labs.