Meta About to Test NFTs on Instagram Stories with Spark AR

Meta announced Wednesday that it will begin testing NFTs on Instagram Stories using its augmented reality platform Spark AR. It is also planning to participate in the creation of Metaverse standards body along with other tech companies.

In May Instagram chief Adam Mosseri announced on Twitter that a limited group of US Instagram users will be able to display NFTs on their feed, stories, and in messages. Check out our article about it. The recent announcement is the next step for Meta on the way to integrating Web3 into the company’s products.

The company also stated in the announcement:

“Creators and collectors will be able to share their digital collectibles across Facebook and Instagram after we begin rolling out the feature on Facebook with select US creators at a later date.”

Meta’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg confirmed that Facebook is planning to support NFTs in the future:

“We’ll bring this feature to Facebook soon too — starting with a small group of US creators — so people can cross-post on Instagram and Facebook. We’ll also test NFTs in Instagram Stories with Spark AR soon.”

Earlier this week, Meta also announced it would join with other tech companies, like Adobe, Epic Games, Microsoft, Nvidia and Qualcomm, to create a Metaverse standards body. The group aims at building the next version of the web and develop a shared ethos for Web3 and the Metaverse.

Zuckerberg said in his CNBC interview that metaverse is the big focus of the company:

“We hope to basically get to around a billion people in the metaverse doing hundreds of dollars of commerce, each buying digital goods, digital content, different things to express themselves, so whether that’s clothing for their avatar or different digital goods for their virtual home or things to decorate their virtual conference room, utilities to be able to be more productive in virtual and augmented reality and across the metaverse overall.”

Meta isn’t the only company looking into NFTs. Its social media competitor Twitter brought NFTs to its platform back in January. Twitter’s NFT support allowed users to link Ethereum-based wallets to their accounts and display their NFT art as profile pictures. eBay recently acquired Ethereum-based NFT marketplace KnownOrigin, expanding its activity into Web3. Even existing DeFi companies like Uniswap are beginning to move into the NFT and metaverse markets with their recent acquisition of the NFT aggregator Genie.