Instagram Begins Testing NFT Sharing

Nonfungible tokens are coming to Instagram. Head of Instagram Adam Mosseri said in a post on the platform that “a handful” of collectors and creators in the U.S. will be able to share NFTs on Instagram starting this week, adding that no fees will be associated with posting or sharing digital collectibles. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Adam Mosseri (@mosseri) Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg added in a Facebook post that similar functionality will soon come to Facebook, along with augmented reality NFTs on Instagram Stories via Spark AR. Meta said collectors and creators in its test group will be able to post NFTs that they created or own on Instagram by linking third-party digital wallets in-application, and NFTs displayed on the app will receive a special shimmer visual treatment, with the content attributed to both the creator and owner of the NFT. At launch, Ethereum and Polygon are the supported blockchains for supporting NFTs on Instagram, with Flow and Solana to be added soon. Compatible third-party wallets include MetaMask, Rainbow and Trust Wallet, with Coinbase, Dapper and Phantom to be added soon. The creators in the initial test group are @adambombsquad, @bluethegreat, @bossbeautiesnft, @c.syresmith, @cynthiaerivo, @garyvee, @jenstark, @justmaiko, @maliha_z_art, @misshattan, @nopattern, @oseanworld, @paigebueckers, @phiawilson, @swopes and @yungjake. Meta shared soundbites from a conversation between Zuckerberg and Web3 entrepreneur Tom Bilyeu on podcast Impact Theory. He said on the topic of NFTs as a form of expression: "When I think about NFTs in the metaverse, I think if you're spending a lot of time (in the metaverse)—whether it's working in virtual reality if a fair amount of your meetings are happening in VR in the metaverse, or as a hologram sitting there with someone—then you're going to care about what you look (like) there. And you're probably not going to want to wear the same thing every day, right? So, you're probably going to have a collection of clothing and digital objects, just like you have clothing in the physical world. And you're going to want that clothing to be meaningful and express something about you. So you're not just gonna want it to be generic, like a lot of these early systems. What color shirt do you want? Which designer made it? Which creator made it? That's going to be meaningful. And I think that that needs a whole format for commerce. And I think NFTs are going to be a really important part of that." On interoperability and NFTs, Zuckerberg said: "I think in a lot of experiences—especially social ones where people are getting together and want to express something about themselves—you're going to want these things to transfer. And I would imagine that if we make this pretty easy for it to be interoperable, then there's going to be a lot of developers that will choose for that to be the case, even if not everyone does. So, I think that's going to be pretty powerful. There's a lot of infrastructure that needs to get built just to get to this place where the default for developers is that they can easily enable that interoperability. That's one of the reasons why we're starting building for NFTs not just in our metaverse and Reality Labs work, but also across our family of apps." Zuckerberg also addressed the importance of testing and investing in technology early: "For the foreseeable future, there are going to be a lot more people using things like Instagram and Facebook on their phones than using VR or augmented reality glasses. Maybe by the end of the decade, that starts to shift, but you have eight years until that. So, (we're investing) in order to help establish some of this infrastructure so that way more people get used to seeing it (and) to interacting with it … I always believe that if you think that something is going to be important, find a way to start working on it, because (if) you don't, there's only so much that you can really learn by thinking about something in the abstract. You really learn by putting an idea out there and seeing how people use it. And then we'll get feedback on what we should build next." On centralization and decentralization, he said: "I think the idea that you're going to get to some world where everything is decentralized and you don't have any large companies that are playing any centralized functions seems highly unlikely to me. There's this old saying that there are two ways that value gets created in the world: By bundling things and by unbundling things. And I do think that what we're seeing is Web3 through decentralization means that things that were previously bundled—or bundled as maybe another word for centralized—can now be unbundled, or decentralized … There are some people in the Web3 community who just say, 'Hey everything needs to be decentralized.' The fact that there are these centralized social networks at all—some people think that that's bad. But I just think we should lean into this. I think that there are things that can be more decentralized. And if we can help enable that—just like Microsoft found this equilibrium where the open-source movement's growth actually contributed to its success as a company over time—I actually think the same should be true for us."

Blockchain

Instagram Begins Testing NFT Sharing

A 'handful' of U.S. creators will gain access this week

David Cohen

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David Cohen