Following his appearance at the South by Southwest conference in Austin, Texas, the Meta CEO, Mark Zuckerberg has recently announced that his team is planning to add non-fungible tokens (NFTs) to Instagram in the coming months. While no further details were revealed, Casey Newton – a writer for the Platformer newsletter – tweeted from the conference that Zuckerberg stated that he hopes NFT minting would soon be available to Instagram users.
Last October, Facebook changed its name to Meta as an announcement that the tech giant would now focus on its Metaverse related projects. Reality Labs, Meta’s virtual and augmented reality research and development business, was reported to suffer from losses of over $10 billion just in the last quarter of 2021. This, however, doesn’t mean the end of the world to Metaverse, as this has just been the inception phase and it would be difficult to expect any profits from it.
In fact, this is not Meta’s first attempt at a crypto project. In 2019, Zuckerberg showed his ambition of launching a new crypto-currency “Libra” (later rebranded as “Diem”), a supposedly a USD-pegged stablecoin. However, this project soon came to an end after facing intense pressure from the U.S. regulators. Although it was later purchased by Silvergate Capital, some ex-employees from Meta are building their own network in the hope of reviving the open-source stablecoin.
After Twitter decided to add NFT to their platform this January, multiple social media companies have also followed in their footsteps. Reddit enabled NFT avatars from its own collection, while the adult site OnlyFans have allowed its users to create their own NFT profile pictures since December 2020, just to name a few.
In the near future, the crypto industry may also welcome the entrance of many traditional finance companies. American Express – a major credit card company – has recently filed trademark applications for its logos and designs. This could be a hint that they are ready to expand to the metaverse by providing virtual banking and exchange services, or cryptocurrency services such as enabling investors to use American Express cards for trading NFT.