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Facebook and Instagram have expanded access to NFTs. Meanwhile, however, parent company Meta is making cutbacks.
Facebook Expands NFT Access
Meta is expanding NFT access.
Beginning today, all Facebook and Instagram users in the U.S can now connect their digital wallets and share NFTs, or “digital collectibles. Furthermore, NFT support will be available to all users on Instagram in the 100 countries where the feature is supported.
Meta gradually rolled out its NFT features over the course of this summer. The company added early NFT support to Instagram in May and introduced support to Facebook in June. The company then began to allow NFT to be cross-posted between the two social media platforms in August.
However, only select users have been able to use the NFT feature until today. With over 2.9 billion Facebook users and 1.4 billion Instagram users, today’s update will greatly expand the reach of Meta’s NFT features.
Meta currently supports NFTs on three blockchains: Ethereum, Flow, and Polygon. It also plans to add support for the Solana blockchain in the future.
Today’s news arrived as Meta announced that it would freeze hiring and restructure some teams. It will also refrain from filling some roles and reduce team budgets.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the company’s revenue has been “flat to slightly down for the first time” in its 18 years of operation. He added that the company will be “somewhat smaller” by the end of 2023.
Zuckerberg also said that he had hoped that the economy would be “more clearly stabilized by now,” but that the company will now act conservatively due to a lack of such stability.
While Meta’s digital collectible feature is not its first foray into Web3, the company is surely hoping for greater success than that of some of its past efforts—it has already abandoned its Diem stablecoin and Novi wallet, and its Horizon Worlds Metaverse has largely been met with criticism and ridicule. A year after pivoting his company toward Web3 and with little to show thus far, Zuckerberg needs a win—perhaps digital collectibles will deliver.
Disclosure: At the time of writing, the author of this piece owned BTC, ETH, and other cryptocurrencies.