Unsurprisingly, Instagram is getting into the realm of NFTs. Starting this week, the Meta-owned platform will allow some users to post digital collectibles to their feeds, stories, and direct messages.
Instagram will allow verification of NFTs
This new feature appears to rely not necessarily on just displaying the NFT, but on verifying who created it and who owns it.
With this tool, digital collectibles will be identified at the bottom left with a tag.
When someone touches that tag, it will display the names of the creator and/or owner of the NFT, as verified by information available on the blockchain.
For the verification part of the feature (and presumably future additions), Meta has partnered with Polygon, an Ethereum-based web3 infrastructure, which has plans to become carbon negative by the end of this year.
With the new feature, users with NFTs minted on the Ethereum, Polygon, Solana, and Flow blockchains can have their information verified by Polygon and displayed along with their NFT on Instagram.
Instagram is not rushing with new technology
Instagram wants to “start small” with NFT, CEO Adam Mosseri said in a video announcement about the tool.
“ It’s a limited number of people to start with, and there are a lot more features that we’ll need to build out over time, but we wanted to start small and learn from the community ,” Mosseri said.
Mark Zuckerberg said his company intends to introduce the same tool on Facebook “soon, along with augmented reality NFTs on Instagram Stories via Spark AR.”
There are plans to bring NFT to Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp as well, Zuckerberg told Impact Theory co-founder Tom Bilyeu in a video interview.
For Meta, entering NFT was virtually inevitable, considering her aspirations for the metaverse. But with the NFT market slowing down, it remains to be seen whether its push into digital collectibles will actually attract the next billion users to cryptocurrencies.