According to Engadget and The Daily Beast, Mark Zuckerberg announced that Meta will introduce NFTs to Instagram. While he didn’t elaborate, he did say at a South By Southwest session that “over the next several months, the ability to bring some of your NFTs in, maybe over time be able to mint things inside that environment.”
There had been rumblings that something like this was on the way. Last year, Instagram’s CEO Adam Mosseri stated that the company was “actively studying NFTs,” but that no official announcements had been made. We learned in January that Facebook and Instagram teams were working on NFT connections. According to the article, development has been made on features that allow you to use an NFT as a profile and mint NFTs on the platform, as well as conversations about building a marketplace.
Those first two features are in line with what Zuckerberg said onstage, but it’s still unclear what minting an NFT on Instagram entails. Is it possible to sell a popular post as an NFT? Or create NFTs that can be used as passes to allow individuals to see certain stories? Meta hasn’t said anything yet, however it appears that minting capabilities won’t be available until later. Although the large worth of sites like OpenSea surely makes it an appealing commercial proposition, the notion for a marketplace appears to be even further off, since it appears to have gotten no direct reference from Zuckerberg.
Of course, there’s a metaverse component to this as well. According to reports, Zuckerberg discussed minting your avatar’s apparel as an NFT and carrying it “between your various destinations.” Zuckerberg has previously discussed NFTs and the metaverse, claiming that they may be used to regulate the digital world. Now it appears that he’s seeing them as digital things, as Meta had suggested previously.
“A handful of technical stuff that need to get sorted out before it’ll actually be smooth to happen,” he said on Tuesday. For starters, Meta would have to ensure that the objects worked smoothly across platforms, which isn’t simple. It would also have to, you know, establish a metaverse in order for it to happen (which does seem like a small technical hurdle).
Instagram will not be the first large social media platform to integrate NFT. Twitter added a feature earlier this year that allowed certain users to use an NFT as their profile image. They appear as hexagons, and anyone interested may click through to view the metadata for the NFT. Given how frequently TikTok features are nearly carbon-copied on Instagram, it wouldn’t be unexpected if Meta’s photo-sharing (uh, “entertainment”) app did the same.
