Instagram to begin testing NFTs starting this week

Instagram to begin testing NFTs starting this week

Collectors and creators of non-fungible tokens, also known as “NFTs” will soon be able to show off their creations on Instagram. “Similar functionality” is coming to Facebook, according to CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who confirmed this in a press statement.

According to Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri in a video posted yesterday, a select subset of US Instagram users will soon be able to post NFTs in their posts, stories, and messages. As with tagged profiles and products, NFT additional details are shown as “digital collectibles” and are referred to as being. The names of the tag’s creator and owners can be accessed by clicking on the tag.

Instagram’s pitch for non-fungible tokens is particularly at a time where sales of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) have plummeted 92% since September of last year, according to data from NonFungible. The average number of NFTs sold per day dropped to over 19,000 last week, a 92% reduction from September’s high of approximately 225,000. Instagram also launched a subscription service to help creators earn a monthly income.

Speaking on the announcement, Mark Zuckerberg, Chief Executive Officer of Meta, said,

I’m really excited to start testing this. We’re going to bring similar functionality to Facebook soon, too, and then maybe to other apps in our family. We’re also going to work on augmented reality NFTs, basically 3D NFTs, that you can bring to Instagram Stories using Spark AR, that’s our software AR platform. So you can put this kind of digital art into 3D space and kind of project it onto physical spaces as well.

Speaking on the announcement, Adam Mosseri, Head of Instagram, further added,

I want to acknowledge upfront that NFTs and blockchain technologies and Web3 more broadly are all about distributing trust, distributing power. But Instagram is fundamentally a centralized platform, so there’s a tension there.