u.today
Facebook and Instagram, the subsidiaries of tech giant Meta, are on track to allow their users to create their own non-fungible tokens, The Financial Times reports.
NFT owners will be able to show off their precious art pieces as profile images. Twitter announced a similar option last September.
On top of that, Mark Zuckerberg's company is also working on its own NFT marketplace where users will be able to buy and sell collectibles. This means that Meta wants to compete with cryptocurrency-native companies such as OpenSea and Coinbase.
OpenSea, the largest NFT marketplace, recently reached a valuation of $13.3 billion after staggering growth in 2021. There's, however, no shortage of compares that want a piece of the lucrative market whose value has now swelled to $40 billion. Coinbase's yet-to-be-launched marketplace is viewed as the main threat to OpenSea, but it also has to compete with FTX NFTs, Rarible and other platforms.
Facebook's move into NFTs is all but expected. The company effectively went all-in on its "metaverse" plans by rebranding to Meta and changing its name to that of the infinity loop.
The tech giant's metaverse ambitions were mostly met with mostly standoffish comments, with many cryptocurrency proponents arguing that they undermine decentralization.