Instagram is Disabling Its NFT Features

Moments ago, Instagram announced that it would be ending its work on digital collectibles (NFTs). In a Twitter thread, Stephane Kasriel, Commerce and FinTech Lead at Meta, announced that features supporting NFTs would be disabled across the platform.

“We’re looking closely at what we prioritize to increase our focus. We’re winding down digital collectibles (NFTs) for now to focus on other ways to support creators, people, and businesses,” he wrote. Kasriel didn’t offer any reasoning or justification for the decision, but said that creating financial opportunities for creators “remains a top priority.” The company didn’t release any information about precisely when the features would be disabled, and representatives from Meta didn’t immediately respond to nft now’s request for comment.

The news came as a shock to many in the NFT community, especially since the company only recently rolled out the features in recent months.

Instagram’s NFT timeline

Instagram users only got their first real taste of the platform’s NFT integrations in August of 2022. That month, the company enabled NFT features for users in 100 countries all over the world. However, the tools were somewhat lacking.

At the time, the features only allowed users to display NFTs they created or collected. In short, the platforms’ core NFT functionalities had yet to be added — namely, the ability for users to mint, buy, and sell NFTs with one another. It wasn’t until November of 2022 that things changed. Just ahead of the new year, Instagram allowed a select group of creators to start selling NFTs on the platform. The artists who were selected were hopeful, believing that the move would lead to a new and more equitable creator economy.

“The NFT community would be wise to understand how intertwined we are with social media, […] I think with our powers combined, we can create a more sustainable system for creatives who work in interconnected online communities,” Dave Krugman, one of the creators selected to test Instagram’s NFT marketplace features, told nft now at the time.

That was only four months ago.

The Web3 community responds

When the news broke today, Krugman was one of the first creators to respond. “Such a short-sighted move. [The] inclusion of digital collectibles has so much potential to help creators engage their communities and counterbalance the pitfalls of attention-based advertising economies. You guys quit before you even started. A real shame and undoing a lot of really smart work by great people there,” he wrote.

This is a breaking story and will be updated.