Why are NFTs coming to Instagram? – Geeky Review

Despite their huge decline in popularity and value, NFTs are making their way to Instagram. Selected users will have the option to display and share NFTs on their profile beginning the week of May 16. Instagram claims that integrating NFTs will help artists make money, but Instagram is a business, so it’s obviously looking for a way to cash in on NFTs.

Mark Zuckerberg calls this a “test,” as will Instagram slowly integrate NFTs with your platform. At first, Instagram will basically treat NFTs as fancy images. They will have a shiny animation (like holographic baseball cards) and will include the names of the artist and owner. Later on, NFTs will work with Instagram’s AR filters, though the details are a bit fuzzy.

Unlike Twitter, which only offers NFT avatars to Twitter Blue subscribers, Instagram will allow people to share NFTs for free. Instagram boss Adam Mosseri says the platform will help support artists and Instagram will work with the cryptocurrency community to create new features without violating the decentralized nature of NFTs.

But as we know, the promise that NFTs will help artists rarely comes true. People regularly steal the work of artists to create NFTs, small artists trying to make NFTs often lose money doing so, and frankly, the most popular NFTs are ugly generative images generated by an algorithm.

NFTs on Instagram 🎉

This week we begin testing digital collectibles with a handful of US creators and collectors who will be able to share NFTs on Instagram. There will be no fees associated with posting or sharing a digital collectible on IG.

See you next week! ✌🏼 pic.twitter.com/VuJbMVSBDr

-Adam Mosseri (@mosseri) May 9, 2022

Obviously, and I shouldn’t need to say this, Facebook (now Meta) thinks it can profit from adopting NFTs. The company hasn’t explicitly stated this, although Mark Zuckerberg recently explained the need for Facebook to diversify its revenue streams through a two-pronged strategy.

The first step is to make Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp more profitable. This “family of apps,” as Zuckerberg describes it, is currently suffering from “Apple’s iOS changes,” which have made it harder to collect and sell user data.

We’ve previously seen Instagram open an in-app marketplace with a custom checkout system, so an integrated NFT marketplace wouldn’t be much of a surprise. And while Facebook hasn’t discussed an NFT Instagram store, it has previously attempted to create a cryptocurrency and has repeatedly mentioned how NFTs could contribute to the metaverse.

And that brings us to the second part of Facebook’s strategy, which is the “Reality Labs” section of their business: the metaverse, mixed reality, etc. When Mark Zuckerberg introduced his metaverse concept last year, he discussed how NFTs could power a virtual economy and even shared a concept video of musician Jon Batiste selling NFT merch at a virtual concert.

Even if Instagram doesn’t build an NFT marketplace, the company will learn a lot about NFTs. This knowledge could contribute to the cryptoeconomy of the metaverse, and could of course help integrate that economy with Facebook’s social media applications.

Anyway, get ready, because NFTs are coming to Instagram. Digital assets will come to Facebook later, though the company hasn’t announced when that will happen.

Source: Zuckerberg, Mosseri