Instagram to incorporate NFTs, Zuckerberg said

Mark Zuckerberg revealed plans to integrate NFTs into the Instagram platform, but it’s still unclear what this will look like. The news continues Meta’s narrative that it is moving closer to its proposed ‘metaverse’ goal.

According to Engadget, NFTs are coming to Instagram, as Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg told SXSW.

“We’re working on bringing NFTs to Instagram in the near term,” said Zuckerberg, adding that the feature will come “over the next several months.”

Discussions around Instagram getting into NFTs have been happening for several months, but this is the first time Zuckerberg has confirmed the news himself. In December, Instagram lead Adam Mosseri had said the team was “actively exploring NFTs.”

Earlier in January, the Financial Times reported that Facebook and Instagram might allow users to create and sell NFTs directly on the platforms and potentially introduce NFT profile pictures.

NFTs could eventually play a role in Meta’s eventual long-term vision of creating a virtual world for its users, Zuckerberg added.

Meta has aimed an ambitious goal of building out a VR and AR universe described as the next phase of the internet. The firm has poured significant resources into the effort, but the team working on the metaverse, Meta’s Reality Labs, reported a loss of more than $10 billion in 2021.

However, it’s unclear yet, how the NFTs will be integrated into Instagram in the near future.

“I’m not ready to kind of announce exactly, what that’s going to be today,” said Zuckerberg, however, suggesting several ideas in this vein.

“I would hope that you know, the clothing that your avatar is wearing in the metaverse, you know, can be basically minted as an NFT, and you can take it between your different places. There’s like, a bunch of technical things that need to get worked out before that’ll really be seamless to happen,” Meta CEO added.

Twitter enabled NFT profile pictures for premium users earlier this year – an integration that stops short of what Meta is hinting at here — but between Jack Dorsey’s crypto hype and the platform’s existing NFT community, non-fungible features might be more at home there than on Instagram.

There’s also the matter that Meta’s track record of products in the cryptoverse is spotty so far, to put it generously. Facing headwinds from central banks and regulators, the company downsized the grand plans for its own cryptocurrency Diem until they bore little resemblance to its initial pronouncements of an industry-shaking innovation.