YouTube CEO Says NFTs and Crypto Present a “Previously Unimaginable Opportunity”

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A week after Twitter added support for NFT avatars, YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki said cryptocurrency and NFTs present a “previously unimaginable opportunity to grow the connection between creators and their fans.” on Youtube.

Wojcicki hasn’t announced any specific plans to add blockchain functionality to YouTube, but calling NFTs an “opportunity” certainly sounds like the site is working on something. Head of YouTube Games Ryan Wyatt announced today that he is leaving YouTube for a blockchain company, as did Senior Director of Creator Partnerships Jamie Byrne (for another blockchain company) he is so clear that other people at YouTube are interested in cryptocurrency and NFTs. (Except in the extremely unlikely event that the departures of Wyatt and Byrne were the only ones, besides Wojcicki, to sip on crypto hype.)

“We are still focused on expanding the YouTube ecosystem to help creators take advantage of emerging technologies, including things like NFTs, while continuing to strengthen and improve creator and fan experiences on YouTube. “, Wojcicki wrote in an open letter about YouTube’s plans for 2022. The site will likely expand on its blockchain intentions within a year, then.

Otherwise, much of the letter is Shorts, YouTube’s answer to TikTok videos. Wojcicki announced that YouTube had 5 trillion views of Shorts and said his teams were “working to make it even easier for creators and users to create game-related Shorts.” Also on the games category, YouTube is “focusing on better live discovery and more chat features” and plans to add a membership gift feature this year, Wojcicki said.

Along with Twitter and YouTube, voice and text chat network Discord has previously toyed with the idea of ​​NFT integration, but said last November it had no plans to implement the ideas. As for NFTs in games themselves, we recently took a look at current and upcoming projects, and there’s a lot more talk going on than anything else right now.

If a giant like YouTube gets into NFTs, I wonder if companies like Discord and big game developers won’t follow. It gets a little easier to ride out the backlash when you can point your finger at a huge company like Google and say, “Well, they do.”

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