Meta announced Thursday that it is expanding the Instagram NFT integration to 100 more countries, along with added wallet and blockchain support.
On Thursday, a post on Meta’s newsroom announced that the Mark Zuckerberg-led company is expanding its Instagram NFT integration across 100 countries. The same announcement also revealed that the expansion would include adding support for additional wallet and blockchain integrations.
The announcement was simultaneously posted on Meta Newsroom’s official Twitter account.
This week, the rollout starts on Instagram, Meta’s photo- and video-sharing app. Digital collectibles will be tested on the platform with select creators and collectors from the US, who are encouraged to share the NFTs they have bought or created.
A Deeper Dive into Instagram NFT Integration
The Instagram NFT integration officially started on August 4, 2022. According to Meta’s press release, the international expansion will include 100 countries in the Americas, Africa, Asia-Pacific, and the Middle East.
Concurrently, Meta is adding support for wallet connections with Coinbase Wallet and Dapper. Before this update, Meta supported only three third-party wallets—MetaMask, Trust Wallet, and Rainbow. By the way, MetaMask has recently added an extra step to protect its users from social media NFT scams.
Moreover, Meta is leveraging the Flow blockchain to allow users to post digital collectibles they minted on Instagram. With this addition, Meta now supports three blockchains, including Ethereum and Polygon. The additional feature likewise includes automatic tagging of a collectible’s creator and collector.
Flow is a layer-1 blockchain with its namesake FLOW token that serves as a tender for network participation, transactions, and governance. Some notable ecosystem partners of Flow include the National Basketball Association (NBA), Animoca Brands, Warner Music, Circle, Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC), Binance, Ubisoft, OpenSea, and now, Meta. Incidentally, Dapper Labs, the creator of CryptoPunks, is Flow blockchain’s developer.
Perhaps the best news is that posting or sharing digital collectibles on Instagram will not incur fees. All a user has to do to post a digital collectible is connect his digital wallet to the photo and video-sharing platform.
Meta’s expansion of its Instagram NFT integration brings NFTs into the mainstream, with the photo- and video-sharing app having over two billion active users worldwide.
This latest move comes three months after Meta first began testing Instagram NFT integration. That first test allowed users to post NFTs as their profile picture, just like how it works on Twitter.
It also follows Meta’s subpar delivery of quarterly earnings for Q2 2022 and its Metaverse unit losing money. The company’s revenue fell 1% yearly to $28.8 billion, while its operating income decreased by 32% to $8.36 billion in the same period. The shocking report prompted Ethereum’s co-founder to criticize corporate Metaverse attempts, adding that “anything Facebook creates now will misfire.”
However, its CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, remains unfazed by the staggering $2.8 billion loss in the company’s Metaverse division. He purportedly claimed that there was a chance to make “hundreds of billions” or even “trillions” of dollars as the division matures.
It can be remembered that sometime in December last year, Instagram’s CEO, Adam Mosseri, mentioned that the social media application was entertaining the idea of implementing NFTs. Then, during the South by Southwest conference in Austin, Texas, in March, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that Instagram was bringing NFTs to the platform soon.
Mike Krieger and Kevin Systrom founded Instagram in 2010. However, Meta Platforms, formerly Facebook Inc., acquired it in 2012 in a $1 billion cash and stock deal.
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