Meta has been one of the most proactive companies in adopting new technologies to keep up with the enhancing dynamics of the technical domain. Recently, a top-level executive revealed Meta’s change of interest which is going to be reflected in its strategies very soon.
According to Stephane Kasriel, Commerce & FinTech Lead at Meta, the company is going to wind down digital collectibles i.e. non-fungible tokens (NFTs). The Meta executive took to Twitter to share the news with the world.
Additionally, the Meta executive posted a five-tweet thread explaining the company’s decision and what they expect out of it. He said that Meta wants to prioritize creators, people, and profits and their benefits over their NFT plans. He started by thanking the partners who joined them on this journey and are doing great work in a dynamic space. He added that the company looks forward “to supporting the many NFT creators who continue using Instagram and Facebook to amplify their work.”
From their NFT initiatives and experiments, the company has been able to diversify its offerings and learn new outputs. According to Kasriel, they now intend to apply all that they have learned to their other products to support creators, people, and businesses on their applications. In his words:
We learned a ton that we’ll be able to apply to products we’re continuing to build to support creators, people, and businesses on our apps, both today and in the metaverse.
Explaining the reason behind the change in interest, the executive said that they want to prioritize creating opportunities for creators and businesses to connect with their fans and simultaneously be able to monetize it. Notably, Meta is going to focus on areas where they can make an impact at scale, such as messaging and monetization options for their insanely famous Reels feature.
Additionally, Kasriel said that they would continue to invest in fintech tools that people and businesses will need in the coming times. He said that they are working on streamlining payments with Meta Pay to make checkout & payouts easier and investing in messaging payments across Meta.
Meta has been one of the biggest advocates of metaverse and NFTs since last year. In September, its founder Mark Zuckerberg had announced that anyone using Facebook or Instagram in the US can connect their wallets and share their digital valuables. The plan allowed people to display their digital collectibles on both Facebook and Instagram in this way. The company had said that the feature was rolled out to enable any Instagram user in the 100 countries where the platform offers digital collectibles to access the service. However, just letting users share the digital collectibles wasn’t the plan.
In November, Kasriel announced that a feature was being developed to allow NFT minting and sale through the application. The end-to-end toolkit was to allow users to create personalized tokens and simultaneously launch them for sale through the application. At that time, it was anticipated that Meta’s move was to attract more attention towards it as the company faced cut-throat competition from its rival short-video platform TikTok.
However, it is important to note that for a long time, Meta had held a strong obsession for its metaverse project. Even after reporting losses worth millions, it continued its endeavors, however a shift has been observed in recent times. The company very favorably looked up to its artificial intelligence (AI) initiative that sparked debates about change in priorities.