Meta continues NFT integration
Meta can push the NFTs mainstream, but can it really enter the web3 without changing its ways ?
?️ Yesterday the company made another step towards NFT integration, announcing Facebook’s “digital collectibles” tab, which will allow creators to connect their wallets and showcase their NFTs on their profiles. They will also be able to turn their NFTs into regular Facebook posts.
The option will be available for selected US-based creators at first, eventually rolling out worldwide, allowing everyone to cross-post between Facebook and Instagram. The latter announced its NFT features back in May, expanding it to worldwide users last week. For the moment the supported chains include Ethereum and its layer-2 Polygon, with Solana and Flow to be added later.
The next logical step for Meta would be enabling NFT trade, and this will most likely happen on its Meta Quest Store built in the Horizon Worlds, Meta’s attempt at a (centralized) metaverse.
The conditions, however, might be quite ridiculous: the company announced in April its intentions to set 47.5% fees on digital assets’ sales. With OpenSea taking 2.5% and LooksRare – 2%, Mr Zuckerberg might need a second opinion on that.
? Despite the plummeting crypto prices and the mounting critics of the NFTs (which is also a function of NFTs’ popularity, so maybe not a totally bad thing), their trade continues at a quite important pace. The recent Chainalysis report shows that in 2022 over $37 billion were sent to NFT marketplaces, putting the year on the right track to beat 2021’s $40 billion. The weekly NFT transaction activity did drop below $1 billion in March, but it is recovering since, notably due to BAYC’s metaverse land sales.
??? Meta’s move can bring the NFTs to a stunning 3.84 billion monthly active users, propelling NFTs and their creators to a whole new level of exposure. However, we do hope that once familiar with the technology and its main purpose of ownership disintermediation, users will be able to dissociate NFTs from Meta, and maybe even discover the whole world of NFT use cases beyond collectibles, like gaming artifacts, newspaper issues, media access rights, personal identifiers, metaverse land deeds …
