NFTs will be on Instagram soon, according to Mark Zuckerberg

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

According to The Daily Beast, Mark Zuckerberg said that Meta would add NFTs. He said during a session at South By Southwest that over the next several months, the ability to bring some of your NFTs in, hopefully over time, be able to mint things within that environment.

There have been rumors that this was going to happen. Last year, Adam Mosseri said the team was "actively exploring NFTs" but didn't have any announcements. There was a report in January that teams at Facebook andInstagram were working on NFT integrations. There was progress on features to let you use an NFT as a profile and mint NFTs on the platform, as well as discussions about creating a marketplace.

The first two features are good, but it is not clear what minting an NFT would mean. Is it possible to sell a popular post as an NFT? mint NFTs act as passes to let people see specific stories It seems that minting capabilities won't be coming until further down the line, though Meta isn't saying yet. The idea for a marketplace seems like it could be even further off, as it seemingly didn't get a direct reference from Zuckerberg, though the massive valuation of sites like OpenSea likely makes it a tempting business venture.

NFTs allow you to buy and sell ownership of unique digital items and keep track of who owns them. It can technically contain anything digital, including drawings, animated GIFs, songs, or items in video games. The NFT can be one-of-a-kind, like a real-life painting, or one copy of many, like trading cards, but the blockchain keeps track of who has ownership of the file.

Nyan Cat and the "deal with it" sunglasses are being put up for auction, with some selling for millions of dollars. There is a lot of discussion about the massive electricity use and the environmental impacts of NFTs.

There is also a metaverse angle here as well. According to a report, Zuckerberg said that he could see NFTs and the metaverse as part of the digital world. It seems like he thinks of them as digital objects, something that was brought up by Meta.

There are a lot of technical things that need to be worked out before that can happen. It would have to build a metaverse for that to happen.

It won't be the first major social network with an NFT integration. The feature that let some users set an NFT as their profile picture was introduced earlier this year. They show up as hexagons, and anyone interested can click through to see the NFT's data. It wouldn't be surprising to see Meta's photo-sharing app do something similar, given how often TikTok features end up with a near carbon-copy.