Highlights –

  • The company took the step to align with the parent company Meta’s vision of integrating with the virtual world, known as the Metaverse.
  • Many social media tech firms are testing NFT integration on their platforms.

Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, confirmed at the South by Southwest (SXSW) conference in Austin, Texas, that the video and photo-sharing app, Instagram, plans to offer Non-fungible Tokens (NFTs) to this platform soon. The founder also confirmed that users would be able to bring in existing NFTs and mint new ones.

“We’re working on bringing NFTs to Instagram in the near term,” Zuckerberg said this week, speaking at SXSW. “I’m not ready to kind of announce exactly what that’s going to be today. But, over the next several months, the ability to bring some of your NFTs in, hopefully over time [you’ll] be able to mint things within that environment.”

Zuckerberg explained that NFTs would play a part in Meta’s vision of the Metaverse, saying, “I would hope that you know, the clothing that your avatar is wearing in the metaverse, you know, can be basically minted as an NFT and you can take it between your different places.” However, he also mentioned that technical aspects still needed to be worked on before the process would be seamless.

Other firms in NFT’s

Many other social media companies have also moved to add NFTs to their platforms. In January, Twitter allowed premium customers on iOS to add an NFT profile photo, with ambitions to expand the technology to its Android app and website. Following this, Reddit, a community networking site, announced that they were testing NFT avatars on their platform.

Similarly, OnlyFans, a pay-per-view site, announced last month that it would allow content creators to use NFT profile pictures minted on the Ethereum blockchain. With the growing demand for cryptocurrencies and digital product offerings, social media platforms continuously look forward to innovative ways to monetize the Metaverse.

Long term goals

Zuckerberg also said that Meta’s NFT ambitions go well beyond Instagram. In the future, Zuckerberg sees NFTs blended in with the burgeoning Metaverse that the company is working on, saying, “I would hope that, you know, the clothing that your avatar is wearing in the Metaverse, you know, can be basically minted as an NFT and you can take it between your different places. There’s like a bunch of technical things that need to get worked out before that’ll really be seamless to happen.”