Instagram Becomes New NFT Marketplace

Since Facebook changed its company name to Meta in late 2021, much of the tech giant’s efforts have been centered on expanding its reach into the growing Web3 landscape. One significant initiative Meta undertook throughout 2022 was integrating NFTs into its social platforms, Facebook and Instagram. As early as January of this year, there was buzz that Meta wanted to let users create, display, and (of course) sell NFTs on its market-leading platforms.

But before Meta officially launched its NFT efforts, it had to address a significant issue related to NFT-related content that violated its terms of use.

Specifically, Meta started the year by banning the spurious @NFT Instagram account backed by Mark Cuban. The account inundated its nearly 2 million followers with posts about questionable NFT projects. Ultimately, @NFT was banned because it posted sponsored content about NFT projects without disclosing that the posts were paid for, a violation of Instagram’s terms of use and FCC guidelines.

Several months later, in March of 2022, Mark Zuckerberg announced that he intended to turn Instagram into an NFT marketplace; however, he didn’t reveal any specifics at the time. Finally, in a May update to Instagram, Meta started testing its NFT features. Specifically, it gave select users the ability to share NFTs they created or collected on their profiles and in followers’ feeds. “Similar functionality is coming to Facebook soon, along with augmented reality NFTs on Instagram Stories via Spark AR so you can place digital art into physical spaces,” he said in the official announcement.

In June of 2022, Meta unveiled its entire NFT roadmap. And shortly after, in August of 2022, the company rolled NFT features out to users in 100 countries all over the world.

However, the platforms’ core NFT functionalities had yet to be added. Namely, the ability for users to create/mint, buy, and sell NFTs with one another through Facebook and Instagram. Based on today’s revelation, that’s set to finally change. With this round of public testing, select creators will be able to sell NFTs with their audiences on Instagram.