Mark Zuckerberg confirms NFT integration for Instagram

What 

CEO of Meta Mark Zuckerberg confirms at an SXSW conference that they will be bringing NFTs to Instagram

Why 

The increasing adoption of NFTs over the past year has led many companies to integrate them into their ecosystem. Meta aims to integrate NFTs into its platform to help users connect with and explore the metaverse

What next 

Zuckerberg did not give an exact timeline but said that NFT integration will hopefully be available in the next few months and that they aim to provide minting capabilities over time

The story 

Mark Zuckerberg, confirmed at the SXSW conference on Tuesday that they are “working on bringing NFTs to Instagram in the near term”. The Meta CEO didn’t mention any specifics about what form this would take but that they are hoping to give users “the ability to bring some of your NFTs.

This confirmation is promising news for the NFT community, as there has been much talk about Meta’s adoption of NFTs in the past few months. According to Nonfungible.com’s 2021 report, NFT trading hit $17.6 billion in 2021, indicating a 21,000% increase from last year’s $82 million.

Meta is catering to this growing market as NFTs continue to become more popular gaining support from celebrities and major company adoption. Other mainstream companies like Nike and Visa, have become involved in the NFT market, as explained by CNBC.

Instagram would join the likes of Twitter in its integration of NFTs into their ecosystem. Earlier this year, Twitter released the option to set NFTs as Profile Pictures for certain users. In addition, Twitter released an official verification system for NFTs on their platform in light of scepticism over the ownership issues that may be encountered, as cited by CoinDesk. 

To combat these challenges, NFTs on Instagram will likely have a limited roll-out at first. Speaking about the metaverse at the conference, Zuckerberg explained that “there are a bunch of technical things that need to get worked out before that’ll really be seamless to happen” but that over time users will “be able to mint things within that environment.”

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