Starting this week, Meta will begin testing a new feature that will allow select Instagram users to share their NFTs on the site. In an Instagram post yesterday (9 May), Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the move, along with a video clip of himself and Quest Nutrition co-founder Tom Bilyeu discussing NFTs, Web3, and the metaverse. “We’re starting to test digital treasures on Instagram this week, so artists and collectors can show off their NFTs on their profiles,” Zuckerberg said in the post.
Twitter enabled users to add NFTs to its site through their profile images and this only happened earlier this year. Only Twitter Blue members on iOS devices may access the feature, which is distinguishable from ordinary profile images by its hexagonal form. While NFT features are now exclusively available to Instagram artists, Zuckerberg said that “similar capability is coming to Facebook shortly.”
He also said that Meta is working on a feature that would allow creators to “insert digital art into actual surroundings” using augmented reality NFTs on Instagram Stories via Spark AR, the company’s 2017 AR lab.
Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri also stated that the service that allows users to distribute NFTs will be free, as opposed to the $2.99 monthly Twitter Blue membership. It will be trialed with a “handful” of US makers and collectors at first.
“Instagram relies heavily on its creators. But one of the difficult problems we have as an industry is figuring out how to assist creators to make a career doing what they love,” he stated in a video on Twitter.
“We’re beginning small because we want to make sure we can learn from the community,” says the founder of the popular photo-sharing app. “We want to make sure that we can learn from those distributed trust and power concepts,” he stated.
