Instagram to support NFTs, testing starts this week

Love it or hate it, NFTs are here to stay.

Instagram users may soon be able to display their non-fungible token (NFT) digital assets on their Instagram profiles. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Monday said that Instagram will start testing a way for users to display their NFTs on the popular social media platform.

“We’re starting building for NFTs, not just in our metaverse and Reality Labs work, but also across our family of apps.” Zuckerberg said in a post on Facebook. “We’re starting to test digital collectibles on Instagram so that creators and collectors can display their NFTs.”

Along with Twitter, Instagram is the next big social media platform to embrace blockchain technology. Earlier this year, Twitter had enabled NFT profile pictures for its premium users.

It is no secret that Zuckerberg is betting big on the growth of the ‘metaverse.’ From rebranding Facebook to Meta and also unveiling a roadmap for at least four new VR devices by 2024, Zuckerberg is investing billions into the infrastructure needed to sustain a complete metaverse.

Needless to say, Meta feels that NFTs are an important part of its push for this metaverse craze.

Instagram head Adam Mosseri in a tweet shared more details about the new NFT feature. He said that users will be able to share NFTs in their feed, Stories and even messages. Mosseri outlined that only a handful of content creators will have access to the feature during the test, however, depending on the test results the company plans to eventually roll out the functionality to all 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 also noted the juxtaposition between web3 technology (which is decentralised) and large corporations like Facebook (which are highly centralised). However, he emphasised the need to embrace new emerging technologies like web3 and believes that support for NFTs on Instagram could help introduce the technology to a broader range of people.

“I want to acknowledge upfront that NFTs and blockchain technologies are all about distributing trust and distributing power,” Mosseri said in his post. “But Instagram is fundamentally a centralised 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 centralised 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.”

At launch, Instagram will support NFTs from Ethereum and Polygon blockchain, with support for Flow and Solana coming soon. Users will also be able to use third-party wallets like Rainbow, Trust Wallet and MetaMask.

Meta is also considering to add this feature to its other apps like Facebook, Messenger and WhatsApp.

Instagram and Twitter are not the only social platforms interested in NFTs. In a letter to employees, YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki suggested that the video-sharing platform may embrace web3 technologies, including NFTs, as a way to help YouTube creators make money.