Meta CEO, Mark Zuckerberg has revealed that Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) will be coming to the popular social media platform, Instagram.
Zuckerberg disclosed this in a conversation at the South by South West (SXSW) conference where he hinted that this feature is something the company is considering doing in the nearest future. Although the Meta CEO and founder didn’t readily provide any further details, he pointed out that the integration of non-fungible tokens into Instagram is something already in the works as the Instagram team is already working out some of the technical challenges.
Speaking about the possibility of this update, Zuckerberg said: “We are working on bringing NFTs to Instagram in the near term. I’m not ready to announce exactly what that’s going to be today, but, over the next several months, the ability to bring some of your NFTs in, and hopefully over time be able to mint things within that environment.”
Investors King also gathered that Instagram had disclosed in December 2021 that it was strongly considering the possibility of having NFTs on its platform alongside a subscriber version of the Instagram close friends list. Also, with Instagram’s last summer’s
“Creator Week,” which was an invite-only virtual summit, it was pretty clear that the company would be taking this route when the company characterised the event as a “private event for NFT creators” in its invitation.
Instagram’s pivot to NFTs also plays along the parent company’s broader vision to create an interconnected virtual world filled with digital goods. “I would hope that the clothing that your avatar is wearing in the Metaverse can be minted as an NFT and you can take it between different places,” Zuckerberg said.
This update, however, wouldn’t come as a surprise for anyone who has been following the progression of Meta since the change of its company name from Facebook. Also when you consider that platforms like Twitter and YouTube have also declared interest in initiating NFTs to their platforms, the move by Instagram seems very expected.
Twitter had enabled NFT profile pictures for premium users earlier this year — an integration that is a little less like what Meta is hinting at with Instagram. However, between Jack Dorsey’s hyper-endorsement for crypto and crypto-based platforms, and Twitter’s existing NFT community, non-fungible features might be more at home on Twitter than on Instagram.
