Facebook and Instagram enable NFTs for all U.S. users

Facebook and Instagram have expanded access to NFTs. But meanwhile, parent company Meta is making budget cuts.

Starting today, all Facebook and Instagram users in the United States can now connect their digital wallets and share NFTs, or ” digital collectibles “. In addition, NFT support will be available to all users on Instagram in the 100 countries where the feature is supported.

Meta has been gradually rolling out its NFT features over the summer. The company added early NFT support to Instagram in May and introduced support to Facebook in June. The company then began allowing NFT cross-publishing between the two social media platforms in August.

However, only some users have been able to use the NFT feature until today. With more than 2.9 billion Facebook users and 1.4 billion Instagram users, today’s update will greatly expand the reach of Meta’s NFT functionality.

Meta currently supports NFT on three blockchains – Ethereum, Flow and Polygon. It also plans to add support for the Solana blockchain in the future.

Today’s news comes as Meta announced that it will freeze hiring and restructure some teams. It will also refrain from filling certain roles and reduce team budgets.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the company’s revenue was “flat or slightly down for the first time” in its 18-year history. He added that the company will be “a little smaller” by the end of 2023.

Mark Zuckerberg also stated that he had hoped the economy would be “more clearly stabilized by now“but that the company will now act prudently because of the lack of such stability.

While Meta’s digital collection feature is not its first foray into Web3, the company is surely hoping for greater success than some of its past efforts – it has already abandoned its Diem stablecoin and Novi wallet, and its Metaverse Horizon Worlds has been widely criticized by users. A year after steering his company toward Web3 and without much success so far, Mark Zuckerberg needs a win – perhaps digital collectibles will provide it.