Sources close to the Meta group have revealed to the Financial Times information about the implementation of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) on the social networks Facebook and Instagram. It will be possible to display your NFTs in your profile picture and to exchange them via a dedicated marketplace.
Meta will launch in NFTs
The social networking conglomerate Meta is reportedly setting up solutions to allow its users to share their non-fungible tokens (NFTs) on its platforms, according to an article in the Financial Times.
At a time when NFTs are constantly in the news, the implementation of such a system could cause a real revolution. With nearly 3 billion monthly active users for Facebook and 1.4 billion for Instagram, digital art could be democratized for good.
According to sources close to Meta, the teams behind Facebook and Instagram would be studying a new feature that would allow to display NFTs in profile pictures. The people in charge of the project would also like to set up a platform to create and exchange NFTs.
This last information is not totally new since Instagram already announced that it was looking into NFTs last May. However, it seems to be taking shape, although Meta seems to want to remain discreet about its development.
An announcement that comes as little surprise
The infatuation of Mark Zuckerberg’s firm for NFTs is not new. Already in 2019, a team dedicated to blockchain was created within Facebook, which shortly afterwards led to the publication of a whitepaper for a stablecoin named “Libra”.
Some time later, the name “Libra” evolved into “Diem”. The project took on another dimension: the social network Facebook was also to include a digital wallet called “Novi”.
“Much of the functionality provided by Novi will be used to power NFTs,”
said a source close to Meta.
Last October, Meta’s CEO announced that the wallet would support the exchange of NFTs. At the same time, Facebook changed its name to “Meta,” in direct reference to the metaverse.
This had the effect of causing the price of most tokens of projects dedicated to metaverses, such as The Sandbox or Axie Infinity, to skyrocket.
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The recent announcements regarding Meta and NFTs should be taken with a grain of salt, however. The various projects around virtual artworks are still in the preliminary stages and there may be changes coming, both in the structuring of the projects and in the busy world of NFTs.
Not an isolated case
Meta is not the only company operating in social networks to be interested in the vast world of blockchain.
One thinks in particular of the community platform Reddit, which started to think about a reward system based on the blockchain system as early as 2020. As recently as last October, we learned that it was building a marketplace totally dedicated to NFTs.
Finally, last December, it announced that it was participating in a $200 million investment fund alongside the sidechain company Polygon in order to support initiatives aimed at the development of Web 3.0.
An engineer working for Twitter had also published a video in which we could discover a preview of what the integration of NFTs in the profile pictures of the social network would look like. It is a feature that would be available only for NFTs imported from OpenSea.
Let’s also note the creation last March of Artrade (ATR), a social network project based on NFTs created by a French startup and based on the Solana blockchain.
