Mark Zuckerberg Confirms Instagram Is Moving Into NFTs

thegamer.com:

Meta, the company formerly known as Facebook and now a giant tech megacorp that’s slowly taking over the world, has decided to get into NFTs. The news that Meta was going to be exploring the NFT space first dropped last January, and now CEO Mark Zuckerberg has confirmed that NFTs will soon my arriving on Instagram.

“We're working on bringing NFTs to Instagram in the near term," told a crowd at South By Southwest yesterday (as reported by Engadget). "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 be able to mint things within that environment.”

Related: It Sucks That Magic The Gathering NFTs Feel Inevitable

NFTs, for those who have managed to avoid the acronym thus far, stands for Non-Fungible Tokens. They're basically digital files that are backed on a blockchain in order to convey ownership to a specific person. NFTs can be anything from audio or video files to actual in-game objects, with the biggest selling point being that you can sell your NFTs on various open markets.

But there are a lot of downsides to NFTs, chief among them being that they're not really necessary. Gamers don't need a blockchain to feel a sense of ownership on in-game items, while media files like pictures, videos, and songs are all distributed on the cloud anyway so what's the point of actually "owning" one? Furthermore, you don't really "own" the thing--you just have a piece of code that says you own the thing. Anyone can still come along, right-click, and copy that file whenever they want, making NFTs kinda pointless.

Things get worse, like how a lot of NFTs are outright scams, but that hasn’t stopped giant corporations