NFT support is coming to Vkontakte, Russia’s leading social media site

Vkontakte, Russia's largest social media network, has announced it will support blockchain and NFTs. A crypto technology-based monetization strategy and copyright protection will be incorporated into the platform.

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You can now use non-fungible tokens on Vkontakte

The Russian social networking platform Vkontakte plans to use blockchain technology and non-fungible tokens (NFTs), according to the company's Technical Director Alexander Tobol.

The CEO said both were part of a collection of tools aimed at monetizing user-generated content and protecting copyrights. Tobol stated that an NFT is a digital certificate of uniqueness that ensures that the content verified by a distributed ledger record cannot be forged.

Vkontakte is not planning to establish its own blockchain, according to Tobol. The prominent social networking platform plans to act as a go-between and help with the implementation. He went on to say:

“It is easy to create an NFT, then list it on an exchange. And here, our task as the largest service in Russia for interaction with [an] audience, with an incredible amount of user-generated content, is to provide this opportunity.”

The worldwide market for non-fungible tokens is valued at approximately $20 billion and $35 billion yearly, with a projection of about $80 billion by 2025. However, the states that the biggest issue with NFTs is scamming.

Over 80% of all NFTs generated with Opensea's free program are either fraudulent or plagiarized, according to the world's largest digital art marketplace. Cent, another NFT marketplace, has completely stopped selling photo and audio NFTs for similar reasons.

Vkontakte will also employ its existing Content ID system to verify the authorship of every downloaded music and video content, both in the social media platform and in the databases of the world's leading labels, to address the problem.

Vkontakte's decision follows allegations made in January concerning Facebook's owner Meta's plans to let users of the largest social media company to produce and sell NFTs. The strategy is part of efforts to enter the burgeoning digital collectibles sector.