Instagram Starts Testing NFTs

Facebook-owned photo and video sharing app Instagram is going to start testing NFTs with select creators in the United States this week. z

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

Mark Zuckerberg also confirmed this in his talk with Tom Bilyeu, co-founder of billion-dollar brand Quest Nutrition and the co-founder and host of Impact Theory, about NFTs, web3, and the metaverse saying “This week we’re starting to test digital collectibles on Instagram so creators and collectors can display their NFTs on their profile.

Zuckerberg says that augmented reality NFTs on Instagram Stories will be available via Spark AR so you can place digital art into physical spaces. Meta is considering enabling NFTs in its other apps, such as Messenger and WhatsApp

According to Coindesk , Instagram is planning NFT integrations for Ethereum, Polygon, Solana, and Flow. The third-party wallets that will be compatible for use at launch will include Rainbow, MetaMask, and Trust Wallet, with Coinbase, Dapper, and Phantom.

Creators will be able to share NFTs that they made or have bought, either in the feed, in stories, or in messages.

“I want to acknowledge upfront that NFTs and blockchain technologies are all about distributing trust and distributing power,” he adds.

“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. We do think that one of the unique opportunities we have to to make web3 technology accessible to a much broader range of people. And NFTs specifically we think will be interesting not only to creators who create NFT art but also to people who want to collect it.”

Mosseri says the new launch will create an interesting opportunity for a subset of creators.