Speaking at one of the sessions at the South By Southwest event late on Tuesday, Zuckerberg said that “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”.
The Meta CEO said that “a bunch of technical things that need to get worked out before that’ll really be seamless to happen.”
“We’re working on bringing NFTs to Instagram in the near term,” the Meta Founder said at the conference.
Instagram Head Adam Mosseri said recently that the team was “actively exploring NFTs” but didn’t have further details.
Instagram NFTs Align with Meta’s Metaverse Vision
Instagram’s move into NFTs fits with parent company Meta’s vision of integrating with the virtual world, known as the metaverse. In October 2021, Facebook changed its name to Meta, reflecting this change of direction.
At the time, the company’s head of metaverse products, Vishal Shah, said Meta would support NFTs. “This will make it easier for people to sell Limited Edition digital objects like NFTs, display them in their digital spaces, and even resell them to the next person securely,” he said.
While the company’s NFT plans aren’t much of a departure for anyone who’s been tracking Meta’s aspirations, the integration might be a lot to stomach for some creators averse to the technology.
Twitter enabled NFT profile pictures for premium users earlier this year — an integration that stops short of what Meta is hinting at here — but between Jack Dorsey’s crypto hype and the platform’s existing NFT community, non-fungible features might be more at home there than on Instagram.
Speaking Tuesday, Zuckerberg also said that NFTs could one day play a role in the company’s eventual metaverse. “I would hope that you know, the clothing that your avatar is wearing in the metaverse, you know, can be basically minted as an NFT and you can take it between your different places,” he said, “There’s like a bunch of technical things that need to get worked out before that’ll really be seamless to happen.”
Zuckerberg, who famously used to wear the same gray t-shirt every day, also shared that he now does most of his shopping on Instagram and Facebook. “Probably most of the stuff that I wear, I probably bought through an Instagram, or Facebook Shops or ads,” he said.
Instagram won’t be the first major social network with an NFT integration. Earlier this year, Twitter introduced a feature that let some users set an NFT they own as their profile picture. They then show up as hexagons, and anyone interested can click through to see the NFT’s metadata.
Given how often TikTok features end up with a near carbon-copy on Instagram, it wouldn’t be surprising to see Meta’s photo-sharing (er, “entertainment”) app do something similar.
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