Meta, the parent company of Instagram, has announced that it will be pausing its digital collectibles initiative after barely one year of announcing its plans to allow sharing of digital collectibles on the Instagram platform. Meta’s Commerce and Fintech lead, Stephane Kasriel, announced the change on Twitter, stating that the company is winding down its digital collectibles project to focus on other ways to support creators, people, and businesses. Last year, Meta made a significant push into digital collectibles after its CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, announced that non-fungible tokens (NFTs) would be coming to the picture and video-sharing app at the South by Southwest conference in Austin. However, the features were only made available to a select group of creators and were never widely released. In August, Meta added Ethereum, Polygon, and Flow NFT cross-posting between its Facebook and Instagram products to make sharing NFTs easier. By November, Meta had also added the integration of a decentralized storage protocol, Arweave, to the platform.

However, after learning a lot from the project, the company is stepping away from NFTs to focus on other ways of supporting creators, people, and businesses on its apps, both today and in the metaverse. Kasriel thanked the partners who helped develop NFTs on Instagram, stating that the company is proud of the relationships it built and looks forward to supporting the many NFT creators who continue using Instagram and Facebook to amplify their work.