Following the announcement made three days ago of the upcoming implementation of NFTs on its social, Instagram has started the first test of the display options of non-fungible tokens within the famous social network for pictures.
The announcement of NFTs coming to Instagram
It was Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri who made the announcement of this first phase of testing with NFTs involving artwork belonging to a small number of US users.
NFTs on Instagram 🎉
This week we’re beginning to test digital collectibles with a handful of US creators and collectors who will be able to share NFTs on Instagram. There will be no fees associated with posting or sharing a digital collectible on IG.
See you next week! ✌🏼 pic.twitter.com/VuJbMVSBDr
— Adam Mosseri (@mosseri) May 9, 2022
Mosseri was also keen to point out that this implementation of NFTs on the social network does not include any fees associated with posting or sharing a digital collectible on Instagram.
“I want to acknowledge upfront that NFTs and blockchain technologies are all about distributing trust and distributing power. But Instagram is fundamentally a centralized platform, so there’s a tension there. So one of the reasons why we’re starting small is we want to make sure that we can learn from the community. We want to make sure that we work out how to embrace those tenets of distributed trust and distributed power, despite the fact that we are, yes, a centralized platform”.
As Messori then explained in detail, the first tests will be done with integrations for Ethereum and Polygon, while integrations with Flow and Solana blockchains are expected only later. NFT owners will be able to link their Rainbow, Trust Wallet and MetaMask accounts to verify NFT ownership.
Test users will be able to view their NFTs on the social’s main feed, within Stories or via messaging. While there will also be a new NFT tab added to participating accounts, with a checkmark to indicate verified NFTs.
Not only Instagram, NFTs coming to Facebook soon
Speaking of NFTs, Meta‘s Head of Technology Communications Emea Alexander Voica said:
“In the metaverse, people will buy, use, and share digital goods and experiences, and NFTs are a key piece of the puzzle for making this a reality”.
At the same time, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in an announcement that features similar to those just tested on Instagram may soon be coming to Facebook and perhaps other Meta apps in the future. Zuckerberg also said that Meta will be working on augmented reality NFTs, or 3D NFTs, which users can bring to Instagram Stories using Spark AR, which is the company’s AR software platform.
However, Meta and Instagram aren’t the only social networks that seem to believe in NFTs as an interesting development for their business. Last month, Susan Wojcicki, CEO of YouTube, pointed out that the platform is looking very closely at web3 technologies, including NFTs, as a way to help YouTube creators make money.
