NFTs are coming to Instagram

Unsurprisingly, Instagram is getting into NFTs.

Starting this week, the Meta-owned platform will let some users post digital collectibles in their feeds, Stories, and in DMs.

If you’re thinking, Wait, can’t people already just post a jpeg of their NFT?, yes, you are correct. But this feature seems to hinge not necessarily on just displaying the NFT, but on verifying who made and owns it.

With this tool, digital collectible posts will be tagged in the lower left with a label. When someone taps that label, it’ll display the names of the NFT’s creator and/or owner, as verified by information available on the blockchain.

For the verification bit of the feature (and presumably future additions), Meta partnered with Polygon, an Ethereum-based web3 infrastructure that says it has plans to be carbon-negative by the end of this year. Under the new feature, users with NFTs minted on the Ethereum, Polygon, Solana, and Flow blockchains can have their information verified by Polygon and displayed alongside their NFT on Instagram.

Instagram wants to “start small” with NFTs, head exec Adam Mosseri said in a video announcement about the tool.

“It’s a limited number of people to start, and there’s a lot more functionality that we’re going to need to build over time, but we wanted to start small and learn from the community,” Mosseri said.

In a post on his personal Facebook page, Meta co-founder/CEO Mark Zuckerberg said his company intends to introduce the same tool on Facebook “soon, along with augmented reality NFTs on Instagram Stories via Spark AR so you can place digital art into physical spaces.”

There are plans to bring NFTs to Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp as well, Zuckerberg told Impact Theory co-founder Tom Bilyeu in a video interview paired with his text post.

Meta getting into NFTs was virtually inevitable, considering its metaverse aspirations. But with the NFT market slowing down, whether its push into digital collectibles will actually bring the next billion users to crypto remains to be seen.