Instagram to Test NFTs This Week, Zuckerberg Confirms

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Some U.S. collectors and creators will be able to share their NFTs on Instagram this week. 

Instagram to Test NFT Support

NFTs are heading to Instagram, Mark Zuckerberg has announced. 

The Meta CEO shared a video Monday confirming that the firm was about to start testing support for digital collectibles across its apps. In an interview with NFT and Web3 enthusiast Tom Bilyeu, Zuckerberg said that Meta would begin testing NFTs on Instagram with a select number of U.S. creators and collectors. “We’re starting to test digital collectibles on Instagram so that creators and collectors can display their NFTs,” he said. Zuckerberg said that Meta would begin testing the new feature on Instagram this week, with “similar functionality” to follow on Facebook in the future. 

Though Zuckerberg didn’t elaborate on exactly how the new feature would look, he said that he thinks NFTs allow for “saying something about yourself.” He also noted that Meta had plans to explore adding augmented reality NFTs to Instagram Stories via its dedicated augmented reality platform, Spark AR. 

Meta will initially support NFTs on Ethereum and Polygon, before expanding the accommodate assets on Solana and Flow. It’s worth noting, of course, that Meta could theoretically launch its own blockchain to support NFTs, though that would require building infrastructure and a user base when the vast majority of NFT collectors today are used to trading JPEGs on networks like Ethereum and Solana. 

In addition to Zuckerberg’s post, Instagram head Adam Mosseri posted a video on Twitter today announcing the update. “We want to make sure that we can learn from the community,” he said. “We want to make sure that we work out how to embrace those tenets of distributed trust and power, despite the fact that we are, yes, a centralized platform.”

Zuckerberg previously teased Meta’s plans to support NFTs in March without giving many hints on how it planned to jump into the buzzy space. As many major companies and technology apps such as Twitter, YouTube, and Reddit have shown signs of supporting crypto’s creator-driven space, NFT enthusiasts have increasingly speculated that Meta could move into the digital collectibles domain. The rumors intensified in October when Zuckerberg announced that Facebook had been renamed Meta as the company was shifting its focus “to help bring the Metaverse to life,” all but confirming it would be taking a big interest in the crypto world in the near future. 

Disclosure: At the time of writing, the author of this piece owned ETH, MATIC, and several other cryptocurrencies. 

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