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According to the Financial Times, Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, is looking at ways to allow its users to create and sell non-fungible tokens (NFTs) on its platforms. The article also cites that NFTs are currently a $40 billion market, with no signs of slowing down anytime soon. Naturally, it makes sense that Meta would want to explore ways to capitalize on this momentum.
The company’s Novi Wallet technology would be powering the service, according to insiders. Instagram is exploring ways to display NFTs while Meta is supposedly working on a marketplace. The FT article states that they are ‘at an early stage and could yet change’ in terms of progress with this project. However, Instagram’s CEO Adam Mosseri stated, last December, that the company is ‘actively exploring NFTs and how we can make them more accessible to a wider audience.’
Last October, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg mentioned that the metaverse should offer support for ‘ownership of digital goods or NFTs.’ It’s important to note that listing an NFT for sale doesn’t automatically connect it to the metaverse. This is a concept that often confuses speculators.
Purchasing an NFT amounts to digital ownership of an item such as a jpeg, gif, video clip or piece of music on a blockchain. Lately, NFTs have received their share of criticism for a lack of security and market fickleness. Earlier this week, one of the largest online cryptocurrency platforms, Crypto.com, confirmed it had suffered a hack that saw more than $34M worth of Ethereum taken from affected users accounts.
However, with Twitter working on ways to showcase items from a blockchain, and while Reddit is working on its own NFT platform, this level of mainstream adoption points towards NFT support becoming more ubiquitous across the web.