Mark Zuckerberg says Instagram will start testing NFTs this week

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has announced that Instagram will begin testing fungal tokens (NFTs) on the social network this week.

An NFT is an exclusive digital token encrypted with an artist’s signature that verifies its ownership and authenticity and is permanently attached to the piece.

Unlike similar technologies like Bitcoin, each NFT is somehow unique. This means that they can be applied to more than just currency-style uses.

In recent years, NFTs have been embraced by people who want to turn art, music, video, and gaming into digital assets. – although, in theory, anything digital can be converted to NFT.

“We started testing digital collections on Instagram this week to show creators and collectors their NFTs on their profile,” Zuckerberg said in an update to his Facebook profile.

“Similar functionality will be coming to Facebook soon, and with Spark AR you will be able to augment the reality of Instagram Stories with NFT so you can put digital art in physical spaces.”

Adam Mosseri, head of Instagram, confirmed in a video today that “few U.S. creators and collectors” will have the ability to show NFT in their feed, stories, and posts.

“Right now there are many ways for creators to make money, but a lot of them are unpredictable and change quickly,” he said.

“We think NFTs are a really interesting option for a subset of creators, the idea of ​​owning a single digital element.”

NFT details are displayed similar to profiles and products tagged on Instagram, and are called “digital collections.”

Clicking on the label will bring up details like the name of the creator and owner.

Mosseri said there would be no fee for posting or sharing a digital collection on Instagram.

However, he acknowledged the inherent tension between big companies like Instagram and the decentralized ethos of ‘Web3’, which includes NFT, blockchain, cryptocurrency, metaberse and other emerging technologies.

“I want to acknowledge that NFT and blockchain technologies – and Web3, more broadly – are about sharing trust, about sharing power. But Instagram is basically a centralized platform, so the tension is there,” Mosseri said.

“So one of the reasons we start small is that we want to make sure we can learn from the community.

“We want to make sure that we embrace these principles of distributed trust and distributed power, even though we are a centralized platform.

“We believe that one of the great opportunities we have is to make Web3 technology available to many people.

“And we think NFTs will be especially interesting not only for creators who create NFT art, but also for those who want to bring it together.”

NFTs are mostly sold in so-called “drops,” while blockchain-protected markets have online sales time.

Instagram initially supports NFTs based on Ethereum and Polygon blockchains, with Solana and Flow integrations being added later.

According to a report by CoinDesk over the weekend, the compatible third-party wallets will be MetaMask, Rainbow and TrustWallet.

Mosseri stressed that the support of NFT on Instagram can help bring technology into the reach of many people.

“We believe one of the unique opportunities we have is to make Web3 technology available to many people,” he said.

“And we think NFTs will be especially interesting not only for creators who create NFT art, but also for those who want to bring it together.”

Instagram is not the first social media platform presented by NFT.

Twitter introduced them to the platform in January as a hexagon-shaped profile picture. An icon in the NFT Instagram Posts corner also appears as a hexagon.

Although companies and celebrities jumped on the NFT quickly, a report in The Wall Street Journal last week said sales had blurred from a peak last September.