Mark Zuckerberg and his company meta have had plans to go into non-fungible tokens for a long time this is the week that Instagram will begin their beta program unpopular photography and influencer network Instagram. they are painting this new feature as a new way for their content creators to display and make money from their digital work.
The Digital Collectibles Showcase tutorial
At the start this feature set won’t be available to everybody and they have selected key athletes, models, and other influencers to participate in this new endeavor. well this is announced as a test it seems that the eventual full rollout will be in available as they expand this feature set across the rest of their property including Facebook and their popular virtual reality Oculus programs.
Interestingly, meta is going to use the popular polygon layer two network for their roll out Polygon announced the surprising but somewhat expected news on Twitter. Stay stay that Facebook or Meadow is partnering with the network because of their carbon-neutral footprint scalable options as the developer ecosystem that is already on the platform. We agree with the sentiment. over the last year we’ve gotten to know polygon very well and appreciate the ease-of-use and low costs for users to innovate on the network / blockchain.
Polygon has become extremely popular as a low-cost option for new nft creators and collectors to experiment with this ecosystem and I’m relatively low-risk fashion. Additionally because of how polygon performs popular web 3 and GameFi experiments including crypto Raiders and zedd run have seen tremendous success.
Instagram is going to test out some new features for these digital collectibles. For example if a Creator posts an item that will be collectible it will have a shimmer effect that will set it apart from other posts that may not be in FTS. When this is tapped the potential collector can see a description of the NST the Creator in the current owner. This is similar functionality that was added by Twitter a few months ago allowing collectors to make their profile picture or pfp an image of an NST by collecting their wall.
The beta will start with the following Instagram users. @adambombsquad, @bluethegreat, @bossbeautiesnft, @cynthiaerivo, @garyvee, @jenstark, @justmaiko, @maliha_z_art, @misshattan, @nopattern, @oseanworld, @paigebueckers, @phiawilson, @swopes and @yungjake.
The timing of this announcement however is unfortunate given that nfts have entered the biggest bear Market since their launch with many projects and cryptocurrency capitulating. all that being said we are bullish long-term on nfts the metaverse and web 3.