Yesterday, the CEO of Meta (formerly Facebook), Mark Zuckerberg, announced that NFTs are coming to Instagram soon.
He said this during a conversation with Shark Tank star Daymond John at the SXSW Conference.
NFTs on Instagram
Zuckerberg revealed that the company is working on a new feature whereby users will be able to view their and even mint them in the app.
However, he did not add any further details, not even the possible release date.
He only said that in the coming months, the ability to display NFTs will be added first, and then later on, the ability to mint them.
Aiming for the metaverse
Most of the conversation, which lasted 50 minutes, was about the metaverse that the company is developing.
The company’s goal, as far as NFTs on Instagram are concerned, seems to be to give creators more opportunities for monetization, while at the same time they want to make this new technology more accessible to the general public.
Indeed, Zuckerberg also added yesterday that NFTs could play a decisive role in the metaverse, as many virtual objects could be freely traded using this technology. However, he also warned that there are still many things to be done in this regard in order to be able to offer users a seamless service.
At this point, it is conceivable that the NFT functionality on Instagram could also be somehow integrated, or linked, to its counterpart functionality in the metaverse, as the NFTs of virtual objects will certainly have its own market.
It is also possible to imagine that Instagram users could simply mint their own NFTs and sell them in apps, but the market for virtual objects on the metaverse could be much larger overall.
The beauty of NFTs is that they are a basic technology that can be used in many different ways, for many different purposes in many different sectors. The tools needed to use it are always the same, no matter what the actual use is.
This means not only that it could be easy to integrate on Instagram, for example, a link to the NFT market of the metaverse, but also that it will probably be possible to create links with already existing platforms outside the Meta/Facebook world.
In short, the potential could be manifold and of gigantic dimensions, especially thanks to the very large audience that Instagram already enjoys.
Source: https://en.cryptonomist.ch/2022/03/16/nfts-coming-to-instagram-confirmed-by-zuckerberg/