Besides Meta employees who shouldn’t be there are “turning the heat up a bit” and hitting the metaverse runway, Mark Zuckerberg highlights Instagram’s extensive NFT support. The founder and CEO took the opportunity to announce expanded NFT support on Instagram tell everyone he will soon turn his 1992 Little League baseball card into an NFT.
Why is that important? I couldn’t possibly tell you, but I do know that at age eight, Zuckerberg batted for .920 as a right-handed infielder in Dobbs Ferry, New York. And soon that information will be backed up with a blockchain entry.
This comes at an interesting time for Meta. The leading cash cow, Facebook, just reported its first-ever second-quarter revenue decline. Instagram is already in a state of confusion, rolling back tests of TikTok-like features because, as CEO Adam Mosseri told Casey Newton, “people are frustrated and the usage data isn’t great.”
So Meta is diving into, albeit late, a niche market of “digital collectibles” that has collapsed sharply since its winter peak. A tracker on Dune shows data from OpenSea showing that, after falling from where it was in May, sales volume has remained fairly stable in the months since.
In a separate report for platform gameNewton noted that Meta, Twitter, and Reddit are all continuing NFT projects, but have no data to share how they’re doing.
The only explanation for this focus is the idea that these collectibles will somehow explode in value when combined with the augmented and virtual reality spaces Zuckerberg is trying to build — but we’re not there yet.
Today news from Meta is that the test of NFT support is available in 100 other countries, with connections for Coinbase Wallet and Dapper, as well as NFTs from the Flow blockchain.