NFTs will be coming to Instagram ‘in the near term’, says Mark Zuckerberg

Meta Inc. CEO Mark Zuckerberg was speaking at a session by Southwest.

Facebook Inc CEO Mark Zuckerberg (AP)

Meta Inc. CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said Instagram is exploring plans to add non-fungible-tokens (NFTs) to the platform. “We’re working on bringing NFTs to Instagram in the near term,” said Zuckerberg while speaking at a session by Southwest, reported Engadget.

However, he didn’t clarify how Meta wants to implement NFT to its platforms. “Over the next several months, the ability to bring some of your NFTs in, hopefully over time be able to mint things within that environment,” Zuckerberg was quoted as saying by The Verge.

The tech CEO also believes that NFTs could play a role in the company’s eventual metaverse. “I would hope that you know, the clothing that your avatar is wearing in the metaverse, you know, can be basically minted as an NFT and you can take it between your different places,” he said. “There’s like a bunch of technical things that need to get worked out before that’ll really be seamless to happen.”

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In January, a Financial Times report said Meta is exploring plans to allow users to create, showcase and sell NFTs on Facebook and Instagram.

Notably, Instagram leader Adam Mosseri said in December last year that his social network was “actively exploring” NFTs. In an Instagram Q&A posted to his Stories, Mosseri was responding to a question about his thoughts on integrating NFTs into Instagram. He said, “Nothing to announce yet but we are definitely actively exploring NFTs and how we can make them more accessible to a broader audience.” Before that, Zuckerberg also spoke in October about how the metaverse will need to support “ownership of digital goods or NFTs.”

Meanwhile, NFTs have been gaining support from other established web platforms in recent months. According to Dune analytics, NFTs are shattering monthly trading records, logging $4 billion in sales every month. OpenSea has seen its monthly trade volume in Ether (ETH) exceed $3.5 billion, breaking all previous records with just two weeks left in January. In January alone, OpenSea set $169 million in trading volume for each day.