The Flow (FLOW-USD) network is seeing some of the biggest price movement the crypto market has experienced in months. With prices up by 45% this morning, FLOW crypto holders are surely jumping for joy. This massive upswing comes on the back of some help from the tech industry. Meta Platforms (NASDAQ:META) can be thanked for Flow’s gains as it reaches further into the blockchain space.
Much of today’s excitement is tied to a long-standing effort by Meta to shift toward new technology. The company is distancing itself from its Facebook roots, certainly; that much is obvious by the company’s name change in November of 2021. But outside of the aesthetic shift, Meta has been piling up new projects — some successful, some not so much. The Diem stablecoin and Novi wallet both come to mind. Each of these projects has been wound down this year after many years of expensive development and trial.
But when the company finds success, it really wins. Of course, Meta takes its new name from the growingly-popular metaverse industry. The metaverse threatens applications like Facebook by growing the two-dimensional message boards into robust, immersive virtual worlds through which users can socialize. Meta is leaning into the new interest by producing one of the biggest and most-used metaverse spaces in the world right now via Horizon Worlds.
The company is looking to continue the winning through its push into the non-fungible token (NFT) space. Indeed, NFTs are an inescapable phenomena. They have become a hugely lucrative technology that continues to bleed both into the art world as well as the metaverse, with which Meta is well-acquainted. The company is implementing NFTs in Horizon Worlds just as everybody else is, but it’s also retrofitting its legacy platforms with the tech to huge fanfare.
FLOW Crypto Soars as Meta Deepens NFT Offerings
In May, Meta began piloting NFTs on its photo sharing social network Instagram. This week, it is expanding the offering into a broader and more permanent fixture of the Instagram experience. With Flow playing a major role in this endeavor, the FLOW crypto is winning big on the news.
Indeed, CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced earlier this week that Meta would be adding NFTs as a permanent feature of Instagram, noting the wild success of the pilot program. Atop making NFT support permanent, the company is also expanding this support across 100 countries. Now, a far larger portion of the world will have access to the feature.
Flow users are undoubtedly quite happy about the news. After all, Meta is doing all of this NFT work through Flow. The layer-1 network, which has overseen wildly successful NFT projects like NBA Topshot and CryptoKitties, is providing the infrastructure for Instagram’s NFT features. In addition to providing the necessary blockchain infrastructure, Meta will be connecting users to the feature with Flow’s Dapper Wallet product.
Since the announcement yesterday morning, the FLOW crypto has been moving with incredible speed. Climbing from a pre-news price of $1.86, the coin is now trading at a whopping $2.70, making for a 45% gain. Trading volume continues to soar as well. Its average is typically well below $100 million in a given day, but today, more than $1.1 billion in FLOW is swapping hands — an increase of over 440% from yesterday.
On the date of publication, Brenden Rearick did not have (either directly or indirectly) any positions in the securities mentioned in this article. The opinions expressed in this article are those of the writer, subject to the InvestorPlace.com Publishing Guidelines.
