As the cryptocurrency market fell into a cold winter and the NFT craze subsided, Facebook’s parent company Meta also announced that it would abandon the NFT function that had been unveiled for less than a year.
Meta Business and Financial Services Director Stephane Kasriel pointed out on Twitter today (14th) that Meta will gradually stop the development of NFT and focus on supporting creators, individual users and businesses in other ways.
Stephane Kasriel mentioned in a follow-up post that Meta will focus on areas that need to be prioritized and can have a large-scale impact, such as Reels’ communication functions and monetization methods. The company is also working on improving Meta Pay to make payments easier, and will also promote SMS payments.
He said that Meta will continue to support NFT creators using Instagram and Facebook in the future, using tool suites to help them develop their communities, but did not elaborate on the reasons for stopping the development of NFT functions.
Meta started a series of test plans for NFT functions in May last year, allowing users to display NFT on Instagram and Facebook, and then announced that it was developing NFT casting and sales functions. Meta also stated at the time that the reason for vigorously promoting NFT was Believe in the vision of Web3, and hope that creators use NFT to optimize their content, and now they have stopped in less than a year, which is embarrassing.
The Wall Street Journal noted on Friday that Meta plans to make multiple rounds of layoffs in the coming months. The company is also expected to “shut down some projects and teams,” the people said.