Meta revealed yesterday that it will begin rolling out support for NFTs on the popular photo-sharing app Instagram this week, after CEO and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg’s tease in March. Support on Facebook is also just around the corner.
Starting this week in the United States, Instagram will allow NFT collectors and producers to link their crypto wallets to display verified collectibles, with a progressive rollout that won’t touch every user at once. The tool will first enable NFTs created on Ethereum and Polygon, an Ethereum sidechain scaling solution.
Instagram will soon include support for NFTs created on Solana and Flow, two other popular collectibles platforms. MetaMask, Rainbow, and Trust Wallet are among the wallets that will be supported at launch, with Phantom, Coinbase Wallet, and Dapper Wallet to follow.
An NFT functions similarly to a blockchain-backed receipt for proving ownership of an item. It’s frequently used for digital commodities including artwork, profile images, sports souvenirs, and interactive video games, with a market worth $25 billion in 2021.
NFT images posted on Instagram, according to Meta, will have a unique “shimmer” quality that aesthetically distinguishes them from regular shared images and photos, and they will be ascribed to both the collector and the original artist. There are no costs associated with using the NFT capability.
According to a Facebook representative, Facebook will add NFT support “soon,” as well as the option to utilize NFTs as augmented reality (AR) stickers on Instagram. Meta is launching its NFT initiative in collaboration with Gary Vaynerchuk and Jen Stark, as well as ventures like Adam Bomb Squad and Boss Beauties.
Meta’s move is similar to Twitter’s, which in January allowed select users to show NFT profile images. The feature is only available to Twitter Blue subscribers, and it currently only supports Ethereum NFTs.
While some praised Twitter’s functionality, which was implemented during a hot market and was considered a benefit for popular acceptance of NFTs, others criticized it. Even some NFT fans complained about the requirement to pay a subscription fee to validate an NFT as a profile photo, citing the environmental impact and crypto frauds as examples.
Meta’s efforts are part of a bigger corporate push into the metaverse, which was fully unveiled last October when Facebook changed its parent company’s name. The metaverse is a future internet concept in which users communicate in shared 3D areas utilizing avatars and virtual and augmented reality hardware is supported.
However, it’s uncertain whether Meta would adopt an open ecosystem that employs NFTs to facilitate the transfer of interoperable objects and assets between metaverse platforms. Although Facebook’s October presentation showed NFTs being used for things like digital concert merchandising, crypto developers have remained wary of the company’s Web3 strategy.
Zuckerberg discussed the possibilities for supporting interoperable NFT assets in an Impact Theory podcast conversation with entrepreneur Tom Bilyeu that was published yesterday.
“I think in a lot of experiences, especially social ones where people are getting together and want to express something about themselves, you’re going to want these things to transfer,” said Zuckerberg, per quotes provided by Meta.
“I would imagine that if we make this pretty easy for it to be interoperable, then there’s going to be a lot of developers who will choose for that to be the case, even if not everyone does,” he added. “So I think that’s going to be pretty powerful.”