Meta stops NFT support

NFT ambitions for Facebook and Instagram have officially come to an end 🛑

Last May, Meta started rolling out NFT support for the US-based users of its social media platforms, allowing creators and collectors to showcase their NFTs.
10 months – and a harsh bear market – later, the company announced it is winding down the experiment.

🗑️ Why drop NFTs?

The decision could be attributed to Meta’s “year of efficiency,” which will also include laying off 10’000 employees ( in addition to the 11’000 wave last November) and closing thousands of job listings.
The NFT feature could have failed to yield positive results, and was deemed low-priority in the company’s quest for efficiency.

In the end, it looks like Meta’s foray into NFTs was more of a buzz-chasing exercise 🐝 than a genuine commitment to the web3 space. This is not surprising for a business built on the opaque use of clients’ data, to which the principles of transparency and revenue sharing must be alien.

🤖 What’s next for Meta?

As some fickle influencers recently did, Meta too switched its focus from web3 to… yes, AI, which is currently getting most of the hype. At the last earnings call, Mark Zuckerberg even said that “The two major technological waves driving our roadmap are AI today and over the longer term the metaverse.”

The metaverse direction is still being pursued (it would also be troublesome to rebrand again 🤣), but the progress has been very slow 🚧. Meta’s VR business, Reality Labs, reported an operating loss of $13.7 billion in 2022, marking yet another year of poor performance.
Also, its (centralized) metaverse Horizon Worlds remains an unappealing destination, where even Meta’s own employees adventure reluctantly.

❤️‍🩹 What impact on NFTs?

Sure, NFT support by the world’s two biggest social media platforms could have helped the space (especially its art and collectibles part) to onboard more users.

However, the fact that a centralized company like Meta has dropped a decentralized tool like NFTs may help to finally set a clear line between centralized and decentralized services (this applies to metaverses as well).

All in all, we are probably better off without the danger of Meta knowing our blockchain history when we hit a “Connect wallet” button 😏