Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO and founder of Meta (previously known as Facebook) which also owns the Instagram social media platform announced today that Instagram will be integrating NFTs into its platform.
The Meta CEO was speaking at the South By SouthWest convention (SXSW) and confirmed that NFTs or Non-Fungible Tokens would be arriving on Instagram “in the near term”. Zuckerberg did not provide much detail about how NFTs would be used within Instragram, but he did state “I’m not ready to kind of announce exactly what that’s going to be today”. He also added “but over the next several months, the ability to bring some of your NFTs in, hopefully over time be able to mint things within that environment.”
Zuckerberg’s and Meta’s interest in the crypto and NFT space is not surprising, he did rebrand the entire company to Meta which is a play on the metaverse. Most of the popular metaverses at the current time are built entirely on cryptocurrencies and use NFTs as virtual land plots and assets within the digital worlds that can be bought, sold and traded.
Top Social Media Platforms and NFTs
Zuckerberg and Meta are creating their own metaverse that will arrive at some point in the future. At the Facebook Connect conference last year CEO Mark Zuckerberg said during his keynote presentation that the company now considers itself to be “metaverse first” and detailed its ambitious plans for building out the metaverse. A social, 3D virtual reality space where people from around the world can connect with each other. He later added “As we move beyond what’s possible today, beyond the constraints of screens, beyond the limits of distance and physics, and towards a future where everyone can be present with each other, create new opportunities and experience new things.” At SXSW he also stated, “I would hope that you know, the clothing that your avatar is wearing in the metaverse, you know, can be basicallyminted as an NFT and you can take it between your different places”. Meta announced it would be spending $10 billion dollars to invest in there metaverse with plans to add further investments in the future.
In addition to Meta, other top social media platforms have been busy integrating with NFTs as well. Twitter has already integrated with NFT technology allowing verified NFT ownership via your Ethereum crypto wallet. This features allows Twitter blue users to show off their owned NFTs as profile pictures. Youtube has also hopped onto the NFT bandwagon, youtubers can now sell their video content as NFTs. The future looks bright for the NFT space and big tech seems to recognize the potential growth this space is likely to soon enjoy.
