The company pulled out just 10 months after initially rolling out the feature to select users.

Less than a year after announcing plans to allow digital collectibles to be shared on its Instagram platform, Meta has paused the project.

Stephane Kasriel, head of Meta Commerce and Fintech, announced the change on Twitter. The tech and social media giant is winding down its digital collectibles program "to focus on other ways to support creators, individuals and businesses," Kasriel wrote.

Last year, Meta made a big push after Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Instagram parent company Meta, announced that non-fungible tokens, known as NFTs, would appear on the photo and video-sharing app at South by Southwest. Digital Collectibles Field Conference in Austin. These features are only available to a select group of creators and are 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 also added integration of decentralized storage protocol Arweave on the platform.

Now, a year after first teasing the project, Meta is moving away from NFTs.

“We’ve learned a lot that we’ll be able to apply to the products we continue to build to support creators, people, and businesses on our apps, both today and in the metaverse,” Kasriel wrote, adding that the company will continue to invest in fintech tools for consumers and businesses.

From October 2021, when Facebook changed its name to Meta, to December 2022, Meta's stock price fell 60% from $323.57 to $114.74. The stock recovered in the first quarter of 2023 and is currently priced at $180.90, according to MarketWatch.

Kasriel said, “We’ve learned a lot that we’ll be able to apply to the products we’re continuing to build to support creators, individuals, and businesses on our app, both today and in the Metaverse.”

Kasriel thanked the partners who helped develop NFTs on Instagram.

He said he is “proud of the relationships we’ve built and look forward to supporting the many NFT creators who continue to use Instagram and Facebook to amplify their work.”