Instagram is all set to feature NFTs on its platform. Mark Zuckerberg said at SXSW that Meta’s Instagram is bringing NFTs in the next “several months.” He said users would be able to mint new NFTs and bring over existing ones to their Instagram profiles.
The SXSW festival was held in Austin, Texas on Tuesday, where Meta CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, said that Instagram is working on bringing the NFTs (non-fungible tokens) feature for its users in the next “several months,” as reported by Engadget, The Daily Beast, and Protocol, among other digital tech reporting agencies. He did not give away any specifics, but he said users would “hopefully be able to mint things within that environment over time.”
Meta is not the first tech giant to hop onto the NFT bandwagon. Twitter launched a feature recently in January allowing only the iOS users on its subscription service Twitter Blue that lets users turn NFTs to profile pictures. Twitter has not introduced any features yet that allow users to mint NFTs on its platform.
The Financial Times reported in January that Meta was gearing up to allow users to display NFTs as their profile pictures. Sources since then have said that the tech giant had also considered opening a marketplace for people to trade NFTs.
Zuckerberg’s announcement complements his passionate ambitions for turning Meta into a metaverse company, which will be primarily accessed via immersive technologies such as VR and AR headsets. “Long-term, I would hope that your avatar’s clothing in the metaverse can be minted as an NFT,” Zuckerberg told SXSW.
Zuckerberg also said any functioning version of the metaverse is “a few years off.”