Instagram head Adam Mosseri stated today that the site will begin testing NFTs with a restricted group of creators this week.
There will be no expenses related with uploading or sharing a digital collectible on Instagram, according to Mosseri. Ethereum and Polygon are now supported blockchains for showing NFTs on Instagram, with support for Flow and Solana coming shortly. Rainbow, Trust Wallet, and MetaMask are among the third-party wallets that will be compatible.
Creators and participants in the test can now share NFTs that they have developed or purchased. These NFTs can be shared in your main Feed, Stories, or communications. Only a small number of people have access to the test, according to Mosseri, but the business wants to expand its NFT functionality in the future once it receives feedback from its initial testing.
“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. We do think that one of the unique opportunities we have to to make web3 technology accessible to a much broader range of people. And NFTs specifically we think will be interesting not only to creators who create NFT art, but also to people who want to collect it.”
Mosseri also mentioned that the creator economy is very important to Instagram, but that one of the challenges the company is facing is that, while there are many different methods for creators to generate money right now, many of them are unpredictable and changing frequently. According to Mosseri, this new launch will provide an exciting chance for a select group of creators.
In a statement, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg stated that comparable functionality will be coming to Facebook soon, as well as other Meta apps in the future.