New Ambition Of Facebook And Instagram Plunge Into NFT, Prove Their Impact On Metaverse

JAKARTA - Following Twitter, social media giant Meta is planning to provide users with a platform to create, showcase and sell Non-Fungible Tokens (NFT) on Facebook and Instagram.

If this plan goes smoothly, it will be the largest mainstream support for NFT to date, and help solidify the place of a controversial asset in the digital world.

Currently, according to a Financial Times report, the teams at Facebook and Instagram are preparing a feature that will allow users to display NFTs as their profile pictures, and create new NFTs.

The rest of the team at Meta are reportedly discussing launching a marketplace for users to buy and sell NFTs.

Meta's launch into NFT shouldn't come as a surprise, as Instagram boss Adam Mosseri said last December that the company was actively exploring NFT and how they could make it more accessible to a wider audience.

While last October Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg talked about how the metaverse needs to support digital ownership, or NFT.

NFT, or non-exchangeable tokens, has gained support with other established web platforms in recent months. Like Reddit, which has launched its own collection of NFT avatars for users. Likewise, Twitter has started testing the use of NFT avatars for iOS users on Twitter Blue.

Although NFTs are widely scorned for their speculative value (prices rise and fall at a staggering pace) and lack of security (they are often stolen despite claims that they guarantee ownership), these assets would be even more significant if the giant existing technology chooses to support them.

At its core, NFT is a way to claim ownership of digital goods like JPG or GIF via a unique address on the blockchain. And despite claims that these assets embody a decentralized form of ownership, their legitimacy lies in the recognition of existing online platforms.

For Meta, embracing NFT could also help it have greater influence in what the company calls the metaverse, the concept of interconnected virtual worlds.