Social media website Instagram is trying to bring NFTs to its social networking platform and the over two billion users active on there, as its parent company Meta makes it's expected push into the "metaverse".
The company's CEO, Adam Mosseri, said last weekend that the Instagram platform is working on building features that incorporate non-fungible tokens.
While these digital assets are popular as modern day art or video collectibles, they are also a digital key to unlocking a metaverse, as they can convey ownership within a virtual world.
"Nothing to announce yet, but we are definitely actively exploring NFTs and how we can make them more accessible to a wider audience," Mosseri said in an Instagram story posted on Saturday.
It was already known for a while on the internet that parent company Facebook (nowadays using the name Meta) wanted to do something with NFTs,. And where there is smoke, there is fire. Instagram may not have to reinvent the wheel alone, but will instead partner with Meta. Meta's ambitions are somewhat larger, they want to offer a metaverse (virtual reality environment) and NFTs fit in well with this.
Certainly if digital art or creative expressions take place in the metaverse, this can be renamed as an NFT. The App developer Alessandro Paluzzi shared details about the possibility of NFTs on Instagram in late June. At the time, he posted screenshots of the "Collectibles," stating that Instagram is trying to integrate them into the platform.
NFTs are traded online, usually linked to a cryptocurrency, and are generally recorded on a blockchain. They've experienced an explosion in public interest in 2021. Their total sales so far this year has surged to a whopping $12 billion, driven in part by the likes of big brands like Adidas and Nike making a push into NFTs and virtual worlds.
Thousands of new Chinese metaverse trademark applications:
At a government meeting in November, Gou Wenjun, the director of China's central bank AML and Analysis Center, warned of the dangers of cryptocurrencies. Because virtual assets have no physical basis, they can be used for illegal financial activities, according to Gou. However, Chinese companies massively ignored the warnings. They rushed to register metaverse-related trademarks. According to the South China Morning Post, more than 1,360 Chinese companies have filed 8,534 trademark applications related to the metaverse.
Most of the companies that have applied for trademark registrations are tech companies. This includes large companies such as Huawei and Hisense. Phone giant Huawei submitted an application to register "Meta OS". Hisense filed with several trademarks in various fields such as social services, advertising and science. Gaming and technology giant Tencent also joined in. It has registered nearly a hundred metaverse-related trademark applications, including "QQ Metaverse", "QQ Music Metaverse" and "Kings Metaverse".
Back to Instagram. In July, Instagram's parent company sparked a wave of interest in the metaverse when it rebranded as "Meta" and refocus on the metaverse, a term for virtual spaces where people can play, work, trade and in general interact digitally using avatars. "From now on, we'll be metaverse first, not Facebook first," CEO Mark Zuckerberg said at the time, saying he wanted to transform Facebook from a social media company into a "metaverse company."
Besides saying Instagram is exploring NFTs and trying to scale to a wider audience, much like its parent Facebook, Instagram is still pretty tight lipped about the details such features. Polygon and Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian’s Seven Seven Six venture capital company announced the creation of a $200 million fund to bolster social media tied to Web3 and blockchain technology. Additionally, app developer Alessandro Paluzzi shared details about the possibility of NFTs on Instagram in late June. At the time, he posted screenshots of the "Collectibles," stating that the social media platform is actively working on integrating them.
Earlier this year in october he posted that Instagram is continuing to work on "Collectibles" by adding the ability to connect a digital wallet such as MetaMask. In early December, Paluzzi said that more wallets had been added, specifically mentioning Coinbase, TrustWallet, and Novi.
Instagram with over 2 billion monthly users could significantly increase exposure to this technology and the NFT market. The company is already developing the platform and reaching out to upcoming artists in the space, digital artist Sean Williams said in May this year.
Mosseri also mentioned a few new features, such as profile embeds which extend the ability to embed photos and videos into user profiles. This could also tie in with "Collectibles" if users want to show their NFT as their profile picture, as many already do on the smaller platform known as Twitter.
Sources:
https://nieuws.btcdirect.eu/instagram-nft/
https://cryptopotato.com/instagram-actively-exploring-nft-integration-says-ceo/
https://news.bitcoin.com/instagram-is-exploring-nfts-to-make-them-more-accessible-to-a-wider-audience-says-ceo/
https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/currencies/instagram-nfts-non-fungible-meta-metaverse-adam-mosseri-crypto-collectibles-2021-12
https://cryptotips.eu/en/news/instagram-ceo-says-they-are-exploring-an-nft-integration-on-the-platform/