Instagram has been exploring the idea of integrating NFTs on its platform for quite a while now and its head Adam Mosseri has announced that the platform will soon start testing NFTs with select creators in the United States this week. At the time of launch, the supported blockchains for showcasing NFTs on Instagram include Ethereum and Polygon, with support for Flow and Solana coming soon.
No fees for sharing NFTs, similar functionality coming to Facebook
Mosseri also confirmed that there will be no fees associated with posting or sharing a digital collectible on Instagram. The third-party wallets that will be compatible for use at launch are namely Rainbow, MetaMask, and Trust Wallet. Support for Coinbase, Dapper and Phantom is coming soon.
Creators who are a part of the test can share these NFTs they have made or bought in the main Instagram Feed, Stories or in messages. Mosseri further conveyed that only a limited number of people have access to the Instagram test, but the company plans to roll out more functionality related to NFTs in the future once it gets feedback from the testers.
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“I want to acknowledge upfront that NFTs and blockchain technologies are all about distributing trust and distributing power”, Mosseri said in his announcement. “But Instagram is fundamentally a centralized 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 centralized platform”, he added.
Furthermore, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg also said in an announcement that similar functionality will be coming to Facebook as well. Zuckerberg also outlined that Meta is going to work on augmented reality NFTs, or 3D NFTs, that you can bring to Instagram Stories using Spark AR, which is the company’s own software AR platform.