In an interview with a news publishing house Stephane Kasriel, Meta’s new head of fintech said that the latest crypto market crash will not change the company’s plans around non-fungible tokens and that they have not changed “in any way.”
The company’s Fintech head said that Meta sees this as an opportunity for “hundreds of millions or billions of people” that are either using Facebook, Instagram or WhatsApp to collect digital collectables. It will also benefit the influencer economy that could create digital/virtual and exclusive goods to be able to sell them through Meta platforms.
This concludes that Meta will go forward with its plans to integrate digital collectables into its platforms to give access to its users. He further said that the blockchain industry has performed a “hype cycle.” By a “hype cycle” Stephane indicates that the crypto market with an “initial enthusiasm” crashes in a bearish environment.
For Meta, NFTs are an opportunity to divert the crowd opting for Tiktok to its platforms by allowing them to monetize their content. The company was clear about its intentions with NFTs ever since October 2021. Back then, it changed its name from Facebook to Meta giving its investors and users a clear message of its plan to build a metaverse in which digital collectables represented by NFTs are sold, bought, and collected.
Polygon and Ethereum-based NFTs were tested on some selected users on Facebook at the start of this month.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg also had plans to launch Meta’s cryptocurrency— Libra. The Diem Association (formerly Libra) recently closed down and sold its assets worth $200 million to Silvergate bank. This ended the social media giants’ ambitions for a global stablecoin. It faced pressure from authorities in the U.S. and the exit of several founding members like Paypal, eBay, Stripe, Visa, and Mastercard. Although they launched a crypto wallet named Novi, it will not host Diem but Paxos stablecoin.
Recently, reports of TikTok being banned in the US emerged after a top official at the US communications regulator urged Apple and Google to remove TikTok from their app stores over data security concerns.