This week at the South by Southwest Conference & Festivals, Meta Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that Instagram will soon include NFTs on the platform. Zuckerberg didn’t give an exact timeline on this, but stated that they should be available within the year.
Since the news broke on Tuesday, search terms “Instagram” and “NFT” have generated 29.15K mentions and reached 306.16 million users. Twitter dominates this conversation topic with over 18,755 mentions. Location-wise, users from the United States primarily contributed to the majority of this with 4.1K mentions.
What is an NFT?
If you’re confused about what NFTs are, you’re not alone. A 2021 Security.Org survey found that 66% of Americans do not know what NFTs are. NFT is the commonly used acronym for virtual non-fungible tokens that are stored on the Ethereum blockchain. These tokens have a unique “signature” from their owner, making them non-transferable.
The easiest way to think of NFTs is that while everyone can view an image online, NFTs allow for there to be a sole owner of the image. In other words, they can be considered as a way to make digital objects like collector’s items. For example, Nyan Cat, a popular 2011 gif of a cat with a poptart body, sold its NFT for $600,000 in February 2021.
The metadata on the token even allows for additional information to be stored. This is valuable if you have a digital art piece and want to add the artist’s signature to it. Royalties can also be programmed into the NFT, so the owner can receive a percentage of sales when the NFT object is sold to new people.
How would it be used on Instagram?
The short answer is: no one knows yet. Zuckerberg is traditionally vague about his plans for Meta, however there is speculation on what it can be used for. If you were scrolling through Twitter earlier this year, you may have been surprised to see hexagonal profile pictures. This was due to Twitter rolling out their own abilities for users to use NFTs on their platform by linking them on their profile. So, it’s no surprise that Zuckerberg wouldn’t want to fall behind on the social media FinTech advancement features.
Influencers and celebrities on Instagram may be able to have the ability to similarly mint their own posts to generate more revenue. It may also end up being used as a way to market more content. Much remains to be seen if every Instagram user will have access to create an NFT at all.
Currently, users are undecided on how this will go. It remains to be seen in what, if any change, this will bring to the social media platform.
Coinbase NFT is reportedly making their marketplace with IG features. Seems like IG attempt to keep users contained. It’s more competition for people’s engagement, time and buying habits.
— CharisTheAI (@charis_ai) March 17, 2022
I've got mixed feelings about IG.
On one hand it's soooo full of bots …On the other hand there is a ton of pretty cool NFT projects…
So I'm like in between 😅
— Shapes and Colors ™ (@ShapesTm) March 17, 2022
Author: Eden Wallace
