Meta is considering including support for NFT within its popular social network, Instagram. Mark Zuckerberg himself confirmed this during the South by SouthWest conference in Texas, in a panel on the Metaverse held this week.
“We’re working on bringing NFTs to Instagram in the near term. 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,” explained Zuckerberg.
NFTs are digital certificates of authenticity that, through blockchain technology, are associated with a single digital file. This allows a digital file, in principle easy to duplicate, to be considered unique or original. NFTs have become incredibly popular within the art and music world, as they allow a creator to sell digital pieces with the same properties as if selling a physical work. It can technically contain anything digital: drawings, animated GIFs, songs, or items in video games. An NFT can either be one-of-a-kind or one copy of many, but the blockchain keeps track of who has ownership of the file.
In Meta’s case, it’s an expected move. Last December Adam Mosseri, head of Instagram, already hinted that his team was considering different ways to introduce NFT within the Instagram experience.
For Meta it could be a long-term strategy to dominate the so-called metaverse, the idea that the evolution of today’s Internet will be a digital world to which we will connect with virtual or augmented reality glasses.
In this context, NFTs could be useful for designating virtual objects in a unique way, allowing them to be bought and sold or moved between virtual spaces controlled by different companies.
However, it’s still not exactly clear what minting an NFT on Instagram would mean. Meta isn’t saying yet, though it does seem that minting capabilities won’t be coming until further down the line.
