zycrypto.com
Instagram is doubling down on its Metaverse bet. Continuing its recent rollout, tech giant Meta announced that Instagram is creating an NFT minting and sale feature through its app.
Like Reddit, the popular photo-sharing app turned to Polygon for its digital collectibles marketplace plans. Polygon’s token MATIC has enjoyed a significant spike in buying pressure that coincides with Meta’s announcement.
Instagram Users Will Soon Be Able To Mint And Sell Polygon-Based NFTs
Instagram recently expanded the digital collectibles feature to 100 countries in Africa, Asia-Pacific, the Middle East, and the Americas, letting creators share any NFTs they own by connecting their digital wallets to the app.
Now, Instagram has added a feature that allows users to create and launch their own NFTs for sale through the social media platform using the forthcoming “end-to-end toolkit”.
“A small group of creators will soon be able to create digital collectibles (NFTs) and sell them right on Instagram,” Stephane Kasriel, head of commerce and financial technologies at Meta, said in a tweet.
The NFT features will first be available to a small group of creators in the U.S., including, DrifterShoots, Ilse Valfré, Amber Vittoria, Jason Seife, and others. Instagram said the expansion to users in other countries would follow, although it did not specify when this would happen.
Instagram will utilize the Polygon blockchain for NFT minting. The social media app will also get NFT information from OpenSea so that collection names and descriptions can be viewed on the platform.
For now, Meta supports Ethereum, Flow, and Polygon blockchains, but it plans to add the Solana blockchain and its popular Phantom wallet in the near future.
What Meta’s Integration Means For Polygon
Meta’s Kasriel said users won’t be charged any fees to mint or sell NFTs until 2024. He added that gas fees for creators and collectors on Instagram would be covered by Meta “at launch”. However, NFT purchases “made within the Instagram app on the Android and iOS operating systems are subject to applicable app store fees.”
Meta is the world’s largest social media firm, managing Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. As of the third quarter of 2022, it had at least 3.71 billion users globally. Meta’s NFTs-related project could be a huge catalyst for mainstream adoption and help publicize the use of digital assets while giving creators a way to monetize their art.
Meta’s move is also a vote of confidence in the underlying blockchain technology even as the broader crypto market remains stuck in the doldrums, with the prices of major tokens, bitcoin and ether, languishing around $20,000 and $1,500, respectively, for the past couple of months.
Meanwhile, the native token of the Polygon blockchain, MATIC, jumped more than 10.1% in the past 24 hours. The Layer 2 scaling solution’s token is trading at $0.95 as of press time, according to CoinGecko. Additional bullish pressure around the present price level could lead to more substantial gains above $1 despite the uncertainties in the crypto market.