As TikTok found out last year, there are pitfalls for a huge social media platform doing anything with NFTs. No wonder Instagram is treading fairly cautiously with its first toe-dip in the non-fungible waters.
“What we’re starting with this week is the ability for creators and people to share NFTs that they’ve made or that they’ve bought, either in feed, or in stories, or in messaging,” said boss Adam Mosseri in his launch announcement.
“It’s a limited number of people to start, and there’s a lot more functionality that we’re going to need to build over time, but we wanted to start small and learn from the community.”
NFTs on Instagram 🎉
— Adam Mosseri (@mosseri) May 9, 2022
This week we’re beginning to test digital collectibles with a handful of US creators and collectors who will be able to share NFTs on Instagram. There will be no fees associated with posting or sharing a digital collectible on IG.
See you next week! ✌🏼 pic.twitter.com/VuJbMVSBDr
And the caution? “I want to acknowledge upfront that NFTs and blockchain technologies, and web3 more broadly, are all about distributing trust, distributing power. But Instagram is fundamentally a centralised platform,” said Mosseri.
“So there’s a tension there. So one of the reasons why we’re starting small is we want to make sure that we can learn from the community. We want to make sure that we work out how to embrace those tenets of distributed trust and distributed power, despite the fact that we are, yes, a centralised platform.”
Tools: platforms to help you reach new audiences
Tools: Kaiber
In the year or so since its launch, AI startup Kaiber has been making waves,…