Instagram Announces NFT Integration; Posting Digital Collectibles Is Free But Not Yet For Everybody

Instagram, the photo and video sharing social media service owned by Meta, announced the highly anticipated integration of Non-Fungible Tokens (NFT) this week. While posting digital collectibles is free, unfortunately it is not for everybody.

"This week we’re beginning to test digital collectibles with a handful of U.S. creators and collectors who will be able to share NFTs on Instagram. There will be no fees associated with posting or sharing a digital collectible on IG," Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri said Monday.

Blockchains supported by the Instagram NFT launch are Polygon and Ethereum while support for Solana and Flow are said to follow suit soon. Metamask, Rainbow, and Trust are third-party wallets users could tap onto at the integration's launch while Dapper, Phantom and Coinbase support is promised to roll out at a later date.

With the Instagram NFT integration test, creators and owners can share their digital collectibles in their main IG Feed, messages, or Stories. The test, however, is not for everybody but only for a limited number of people. After the test and feedback were gathered, Instagram plans to include more functionality related to NFT.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the move to test NFT on Instagram is just a start of an ecosystem-wide integration of Non-Fungible Tokens, revealing the team plans to display digital collectibles to other apps under Meta, including Facebook, WhatsApp and Messenger.

"We’re starting building for NFTs not just in our metaverse and Reality Labs work, but also across our family of apps,” Zuckerberg said in an interview with Impact Theory’s Tom Bilyeu shared on Facebook Monday. "We’re going to bring similar functionality to Facebook soon," the CEO promised.

Zuckerberg also noted that aside from NFT, the team is also looking into "augmented reality NFTs" for the photo and video sharing social media platform. Data and insights provider DataReportal reported that Instagram has around 1.5 billion users all over the world as of January 2022, a massive user count, which is half of Facebook's 2.9 billion users.

Deutsche Bank said in March that Instagram's NFT integration has the potential to boost the overall market going mainstream. With billions of users, the multinational investment bank and financial services company believe the integration could help "lower the barriers to entry" of NFT, enabling anyone to create and sell NFTs.