Instagram Starts Testing NFTs This Week
Instagram is jumping on the NFT bandwagon, working with a handful of US artists and collectors to freely share their non-fungible tokens on the social network.
"We think one really interesting opportunity for a subset of creators is NFTs—the idea of owning a unique digital item," Instagram chief Adam Mosseri said in a Monday video.
The initial test, limited to a select few users, invites folks to share via Feed, Stories, or DM the digital assets they've made or bought. If this trial proves a success, Instagram will need to build "a lot more functionality," Mosseri admitted. "We wanted to start small and learn from the community."
A unique unit of cryptocurrency, non-fungible tokens are digital certificates for intellectual property stored in the blockchain. They're typically used for art, gaming, and collectibles, and have recently caught the eye of brands like Samsung and Starbucks.
"I want to acknowledge upfront that NFTs and blockchain technologies—and Web3 more broadly—are all about distributing trust, distributing power. But Instagram is fundamentally a centralized platform, so there's a tension there," Mosseri explained. "We do think one of the unique opportunities we have is to make Web3 technologies accessible to a much broader range of people," he continued. "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."
Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Instagram parent company Meta, on Monday added that "similar functionality is coming to Facebook soon," alongside augmented reality NFTs (or "3D NFTs") on Instagram Stories via Spark AR, "so you can place digital art into physical spaces."
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