After Twitter, it’s Instagram that gives in to the “NFT madness”. The social network is testing various features with a few American creators to display and share digital objects with its subscribers.
Bad news: you’re not safe from NFTs anywhere, not even by quietly scrolling through your Instagram feed. Because, yes, NFTs are coming to Instagram, at least on a small scale. The head of the social network, Adam Mosseri, announced that his platform will begin testing the deployment of NFTs with certain creators in the United States in this second week of May. And if the test is successful, perhaps we will see these digital works abound.
“I want to recognize up front that NFTs and blockchain technologies are about distributing trust and distributing powerexplained Mosseri in a video, acknowledging all the same that the NFTs seem at first glance incompatible with a centralized platform. So one of the reasons we’re starting small is to make sure we can learn from the community. We want to make sure that we figure out how to embrace these principles of distributed trust and distributed power, despite the fact that we are a centralized platform. We believe one of the unique opportunities we have is to make Web3 technology available to a much wider range of people. And NFTs in particular, we think, will be interesting not only for creators who create NFT art, but also for people who want to collect it.”
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
The Instagram boss said there will be no fees associated with posting or sharing a digital collectible on his social network. At launch, the supported blockchains will be Ethereum and Polygon technologies, while Flow and Solana are expected to be supported in the near future. The same goes for Instagram-enabled third-party wallets as Rainbow, MetaMask and Trust Wallet will be available from the start of the testing phase, with Coinbase, Dapper and Phantom potentially available in the future. NFTs can be shared in the main Instagram feed, but also in Stories or by message. There is no doubt that some influencers will take advantage of their huge communities to publicize and sell certain digital works.
However, those who follow Meta’s news closely will not be surprised by this announcement. A few weeks ago, Mark Zuckerberg said that similar features will soon arrive on Facebook and other applications of the group, the NFTs being particularly linked to the metaverse that the boss of the group wants to develop and democratize. Instagram is only the second social network to offer the publication of NFTs, since Twitter allows you to display your NFTs in profile photo format. An option that is nevertheless paying on the microblogging network.