Brace your feeds, everyone: NFTs are coming to Instagram.
Within the next several months, non-fungible tokens will be introduced to the social media platform, according to Mark Zuckerberg, who tentatively announced the news during a conversation with businessman Daymond John on Tuesday at Austin’s SXSW.
While the Meta CEO was tight-lipped about the specifics of the plan, which is still in its early stages, the Financial Times ran a report in January that noted the hope was for users to be able to display NFTs as profile pictures, “mint” NFTs, and eventually establish a marketplace to buy and sell the digital tokens.
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Plans are said to be moving quickly, with sources telling the Financial Times that internal testing was already being conducted on how users could display their NFTs.
Zuckerberg was participating in a discussion about the Metaverse and the shifting landscape of digital culture when he confirmed the speculation. “We talked about stuff like NFTs and the ability, you know, long-term, I would hope that the clothing that your avatar is wearing in the Metaverse can be minted as an NFT, and you can take it between different places,” he said during the hour-long chat.
“I think that there’s a bunch of technical things that need to get worked out before,” he added. “But we are working on bringing NFTs to Instagram in the near term. I’m not ready to announce exactly what that’s gonna be today but, over the next several months, [people will have] the ability to bring some NFTs in, and hopefully over time be able to mint things within that environment.”
Zuckerberg pointed to his own shopping habits as justification for further turning Instagram into a shopping platform, saying that “probably most of the stuff that I wear, I probably bought through an Instagram or Facebook Shops or ads.”
