The Meta-owned social media power Instagram is finally testing its piloting NFT integration feature. Starting from Monday, May 8th, the selected few USA-based NFT creators and collectors are getting their hands on the groundbreaking feature.
The multichain NFT sharing opportunity is aimed to allow verifying, showcasing, and trading of non-fungible tokens on the most popular blockchains, including Ethereum and Polygon for now, and Flow and Solana to be available the other day. According to Instagram head Adam Mosseri's announcement, "there will be no fees associated with posting or sharing a digital collectible on Instagram." This information was probably outlined to compare Twitter's charges for the opportunity to display their NFTs as PFPs.
The chosen creators and collectors who have been allowed to test can use Rainbow, MetaMask, and Trust Wallet now, with Coinbase, Dapper, and Phantom coming soon. Currently, these lucky ones are already sharing their NFTs via Instagram Feed, Stories, and messages. After the testers approve everything is working diligently, the full-scale set of features will be rolled out becoming available to the large audiences.
According to Mosseri, the testing is held by a small group of people, who are far from being newcomers to the NFT realm. These NFT gurus were the first to embrace the power of blockchain encrypted into Instagram code: Adam Bomb Squad, Blue, Boss Beauties, Gary Vaynerchuk, Jen Stark, and many others.
“I want to acknowledge upfront that NFTs and blockchain technologies are all about distributing trust and distributing power. But Instagram is fundamentally a centralized platform, so there’s a tension there. So one of the reasons why we’re starting small is we want to make sure that we can learn from the community. We do think that one of the unique opportunities we have is to make web3 technology accessible to a much broader range of people. And NFTs specifically we think will be interesting not only to creators who create NFT art but also to people who want to collect it,” Mosseri commented on the pilot launch.
The news comes shortly after Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg's announcement of the Zuck Bucks launch accompanied by the NFT integration on Facebook and Instagram. That announcement was made at the recent 2022 SXSW Festival without any specifications of date or details.
