NFT Features Coming to Instagram, Mark Zuckerberg Reveals

Instagram could soon get features around non-fungible tokens (NFTs), Mark Zuckerberg revealed during a recent conference. Zuckerberg-headed Meta (formerly Facebook), is the parent company of the popular photo-messaging app that roughly has around a billion users from around the world, as per research firm Statista. Instagram will essentially be following Twitter, which has already begun adding NFT-related features on the micro-blogging platform, allowing holders of these digital collectibles to showcase their priced virtual possessions. Supported on the blockchain, NFTs are digital assets inspired by a wide array of things including people, pictures, food items, cartoons, and even game characters.

Zuckerberg, 37, spoke about Instagram's NFT plans while speaking at the South by Southwest conference in Austin, Texas.

Without getting into elaborate details, the tech mogul said that Instagram users will "hopefully" get to mint their own NFTs on the app in the months to come, CoinTelegraph reported.

Digital artists, who have been appreciating the NFT sector for putting their work on the map, will witness a boom in terms of reaching out to a wider section of global audience with Instagram's upcoming features.

For now, the date of the launch of these NFT features on the photo-messaging app remains unclear.

On November 1, social networking mammoth Facebook announced a fresh rebranding under a new name, Meta. The company officials claim to be getting ready for the metaverse, which, powered by augmented reality (AR), will make for a fully functional virtual universe.

According to Zuckerberg, in the metaverse future, a person “will be able to teleport instantly as a hologram to be at the office without a commute, at a concert with friends, or in your parents' living room to catch up. This will open up more opportunity no matter where you live.”

A Bloomberg Intelligence report says the market opportunity for the metaverse to reach $800 billion (roughly Rs. 59,58,719 crore) by 2024.

NFTs will make for intrinsic elements of the metaverse, allowing people to engage and interact with them as virtual avatars. At this point it is not totally unforeseen that NFT-related features are expected to debut on other Meta platforms like WhatsApp and the Facebook app.

In January this year, Twitter allowed its NFT holding users to display their digital collectible as a hexagonal profile pictures. Tapping on the pictures prompts details about the art and its ownership to appear.

Other social networking apps such as Reddit, OnlyFans, and YouTube are also testing NFT-centric features for their respective platforms.

The volume of NFT sales crossed, the mark of $25 billion (roughly Rs. 1,84,700 crore) in 2021.

But this month, the volumes of NFT-related search volumes have dipped massively on Google Trends.

The average selling price of a non-fungible token has also declined to under $2,000 (roughly Rs. 1.5 lakh), compared with an all-time high of almost $6,900 (roughly Rs. 5.3 lakh) at the beginning of 2022, according to NFT resource NonFungible data.