VK, Russian Social Media Giant, Supports NFTs

Russian social network VK that has more than 650 million users (as of April 2021) is creating its own NFT marketplace and moving towards developing a Metaverse. This is what VK’s technical director Alexander Tobol said on Highload++ Foundation Conference held on May 13th and 14th in St.Petersburg.

‘We are generally moving towards Metaverses. Now we have started with NFTs, with protecting copyright and monetising user-generated content, but we think that NFTs are on the rise, and VK should become the main service provider for NFTs in Russia and the CIS. We would like to become an NFT marketplace that would allow choice between various blockchains’, — Tobol shared with the journalists.

VK is also looking into different scenarios that will allow it to protect and sell content. ‘For instance, if you are great at creating stickers. You make a sticker set for a football team, it buys the stickers from you, and you get a certain percentage from selling these stickers to the team’s fans. 10% goes to you, 40% to VK, 50% to the football team. Besides, the stickers are unique, and there can only be 1,000 of them’, — explained Tobol.

The marketplace will work with all blockchain platforms that are ready to provide their interface to represent VK’s tokens. However, VK is ready to think about developing its own blockchain in case they see major limitations.

The marketplace is said to be launched any time soon, however, there is no information on the VK Metaverse yet.

The Russian social media giant’s entry into the NFT space marks another well-known company’s venture into the NFT market.

Facebook’s Meta rebrand started the trend that was then picked up by Twitter, Reddit, YouTube and Instagram. Twitter, however, was the first to initiate this trend last month when it debuted the NFT profile picture feature on the social media platform for $3.