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 that will make it possible to buy and sell collectibles. Meta will have to compete with cryptocurrency-native companies such as OpenSea and Coinbase.
It should be noted that Meta's NFT efforts are still in their infancy, meaning that the above-mentioned features are unlikely to launch anytime soon.
OpenSea, the largest NFT marketplace, recently reached a valuation of $13.3 billion after staggering growth in 2021. There are, however, no shortage of companies 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 the former also has to compete with FTX NFTs, Rarible and other platforms.
The tech giant's metaverse ambitions were mostly met with mostly standoffish comments, with many cryptocurrency proponents arguing that they are likely to undermine decentralization.
Sci-fi writer Neal Stephenson, who predicted the Metaverse and coined the term in the 1992 novel "Snowcrash," clarified that he had nothing to do with Facebook's rebrand. The Matrix trilogy superstar Keanu Reeves stressed that the concept was not invented by the tech giant in a December interview with Variety.
Vladislav Sopov