Instagram will start testing NFT this week, creators will be able to showcase their digital artwork

Instagram will begin testing non-fungible tokens (NFTs) on the social network this week. The announcement was made by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

An NFT is a unique digital token encrypted with an artist’s signature, verifying ownership and authenticity, and permanently attached to the piece.

Most NFTs include some form of digital art, such as photos, videos, GIFs, or music, although in theory anything digital could become an NFT. “This week we started testing digital collectibles on Instagram so creators and collectors can display their NFTs on their profile,” Zuckerberg said in an update to his Facebook profile.

“Facebook-like functionality is coming soon, along with augmented reality NFTs in Instagram Stories via Spark AR so you can place digital art in physical spaces.”

digital collections

Almost in parallel, the head of Instagram, Adam Mosseri, confirmed in a video that a “handful of US creators and collectors” you will have the ability to display NFTs in your feed, stories and messages. “Right now, there are a lot of different ways for creators to make money, but many of them are unpredictable and change quickly,” he said.

“We think a really interesting opportunity for a subset of creators is NFTs – the idea of ​​owning a unique digital item.” NFT details are displayed on Instagram in a similar way to tagged profiles and products, and are called “digital collectibles”.

Clicking on the tag will display details such as the name of the creator and owner. Mosseri said there would be no fees associated with posting or sharing a digital collectible on Instagram. “I want to acknowledge up front that NFT and blockchain technologies, and Web3 in general, are about distributing trust, distributing power. But Instagram is fundamentally a centralized platform, so there is tension there,” Mosseri said.

So one of the reasons we’re starting small is we want to make sure we can learn from the community. “We want to make sure that we find a way to embrace those principles of distributed trust and distributed power, even though we are, yes, a centralized platform. We believe that one of the unique opportunities we have is to make Web3 technologies accessible to a much broader range of people.”

Instagram will initially support Ethereum-based NFTs, with integrations for other cryptocurrencies such as Polygon, Solana, and Flow to be added at a later date, the post confirmed. (YO)