- Per Zuckerberg, NFTs will drop on the photo and video sharing platform in the coming months.
- Zuckerberg hopes the platform will, in the future, support the minting and trading of NFTs.
- Following this announcement, Meta’s stock, FB, surged 1.90% to trade around $195.
Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta, has disclosed that non-fungible tokens (NFTs) will be coming to Instagram in the next few months. A report unveiled this news earlier yesterday, citing Zuckerberg’s speech during the SXSW Conference on March 15. However, he failed to share the specific date of when NFTs would drop on the photo and video-sharing platform.
Reportedly, Zuckerberg said he hopes Instagram will let people mint clothes for their digital avatars in the form of NFTS in the future. However, he admitted the company still has a lot of work to do on the platform before achieving such a milestone.
Zuckerberg’s speech confirms rumors that Instagram was experimenting with NFTs. According to a report that surfaced in January, citing anonymous sources, Meta was looking to create a marketplace that would allow people to mint and sell NFTs on Instagram. The report further detailed that the platform would also allow users to display their existing collections on their profiles.
Following the announcement, Meta’s stock (FB) surged from approximately $186 on March 15 to trade at $195.75 at the time of writing. These figures represent a 1.90% gain over the past 24 hours.
Zuckerberg is determined to create a web3 product
This news comes on the heels of Zuckerberg announcing the rebranding of Facebook to Meta in October last year. According to him, this change was part of the company’s plans to accelerate the development of the fundamental technologies, social platforms, and creative tools to bring the metaverse to life.
Notably, this is not Zuckerberg’s first attempt at creating a product for the burgeoning web3 ecosystem. He previously wanted to create a stablecoin dubbed Libra, which was later renamed Diem. At the start, the project had the backing of 28 renowned organizations, including Visa, PayPal, and Mastercard.
However, regulatory concerns saw some of them terminate support for Diem. Despite addressing the concerns of regulators and making changes to Diem’s fundamentals to win their approval, the Diem Association failed to make any progress and eventually threw in the towel.
As a result, the Diem Association sold the project’s intellectual property and other assets to Silvergate Capital Corporation earlier this year. Silvergate Capital parted with $50 million in cash and $132 million in stock to complete this deal.
