Faced with a boom in digital collections, Facebook parent company Meta is working on plans to allow customers to create and promote NFTs (non-fungible tokens), people familiar with the matter said today. The Facebook and Instagram teams are reportedly working on a feature that will allow customers to display their NFTs on their social media profiles. Additionally, the teams are developing a prototype designed to help customers create collectible tokens.
Meta also plans to launch a marketplace for customers to buy and promote NFTs, digital assets that “represent art or images that cannot be copied,” two of the people said. Currently, these efforts at Meta are at an early stage and may change in the future. However, these plans mean that Meta is first trying to profit from the NFT world, which is now worth around $40 billion.
Initially, the NFT market was almost driven by hype or betting. Critics have called it a “do whatever you want” industry, a speculative bubble rife with fraud and market manipulation. Earlier this month, OpenSea, the world’s largest NFT trading platform, raised $300 million at a valuation of $13 billion. Just six months ago, the company raised $100 million at a valuation of just $1.5 billion.
Coinbase, a major U.S. cryptocurrency exchange, is preparing to launch an NFT marketplace to challenge OpenSea. Additionally, Meta competitor Twitter is testing the NFT showcase feature, while Reddit has launched its own NFT platform.
Prior to this, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg (Mark Zuckerberg) had said that one day NFTs may be used in the “metaverse”. Analysts say Meta’s plans could even help artists monetize their digital artwork. Instagram head Adam Mosseri said in December that the company was “actively exploring NFTs,” but gave no specifics. People familiar with the matter said today that Instagram is now internally testing the features of its NFT display.
People familiar with the matter also said that Instagram’s NFT plan was initially led by Kristin George, Instagram’s director of product and creators, and David Marcus, the former head of Facebook’s digital cryptocurrency division who left in December last year. Facebook’s digital wallet, Novi, which launched as a pilot last October, could be critical to those plans, the people said.