Meta has announced plans to suspend its NFT service on Facebook and Instagram to focus on other ways of supporting creators and businesses on its platform. The move is attracting severe criticism on crypto Twitter.
Less than one year after integrating non-fungible tokens (NFTs) into its platform, Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta is abandoning its digital collectibles push altogether, to focus on other areas of its over $469 billion business.
Per a March 13, Twitter thread by Stephane Kasriel, Meta’s head of commerce and financial technologies, the California-based social media giant has decided to stop dealing with NFTs. It will instead prioritize other ways of supporting creators, people, and businesses.
Notably, the company has made it clear that despite deciding to wind down its NFT feature, its top priority remains to create opportunities for businesses and creators to connect with their fans and monetize, adding that it plans to achieve that goal by focusing on products such as Meta Pay, and messaging and monetization opportunities for Reels, which it believes will enable it to make “impact at scale
As expected, Meta’s latest announcement has attracted criticism on social media, with one user describing the company’s latest decision as a ‘short-sighted’ move that could push creators further away from Meta.
Despite changing its name from Facebook to Meta, Zuckerberg’s foray into the metaverse has failed to yield the desired results for the company, as the 38-year-old CEO lost over $70 billion in his metaverse investment last year.
Last November, Meta laid off 11,000 employees, or 13% of its total workforce, to enable it to channel more resources to what it described as a “smaller handful of high-priority growth areas.”
