NEW DELHI : Social media giant Meta has announced that it would start allowing creators to post digital collectibles such as non-fungible tokens (NFTs) on both Instagram and Facebook.
While the move has been in the works for a while, it comes at an opportune time for the industry, and could help revive interest from both creators and collectors.
Like the rest of the crypto market, the NFT market has also experienced a downturn in the last few months. According to data from blockchain tracking firm, DappRadar, trading volumes on OpenSea dropped by 99% in the last four months. India’s WazirX NFT Marketplace, too, has seen an over 85% drop in volumes in the past 30 days, according to DappRadar’s data.
OpenSea is the world’s largest NFT trading platform, while WazirX’s NFT marketplace is the leading marketplace in India. The recent slump in NFT transactions due to the ongoing crypto winter has wiped close to $800 billion in market value in a month, according to CoinMarketCap. In June, NFT sales dipped to a 12-month low with a total of just over $1 billion, according to crypto research firm Chainalysis. Though creators still can’t sell or mint NFTs on social media at the moment, putting them out as profile pictures or posts on two of the world’s largest social networks could provide a huge push to the community, said industry experts.
“It will be good for creators. Facebook and Instagram have huge user bases, which will be good for NFT creators and get them a lot of traction. It will enable them to build communities which are essential for the underlying value of NFTs,” said Sidharth Sogani, founder and chief executive of Crebaco, a crypto analysis firm.
Kameshwaran Elangovan, co-founder and chief operating officer at GuardianLink, an NFT service provider, said the convergence of social media and NFTs represents the “finest confluence between the crowd-power of Web 2.0 and the transparency of Web3.”
“It is important for any new technology and its manifestations to mark a presence in a place where people hang around. And right now, there is no better place than social media,” he added.
Facebook has 2.93 billion monthly active users (MAU) as of June, Meta said in its quarterly earnings call in July.
Download The Mint News App to get Daily Market Updates & Live Business News.
