The CEO of Meta, Mark Zuckerberg, has confirmed that Instagram will be launching a non-fungible token (NFT) feature soon. He made this statement at South by Southwest (SXSW) 2022, an annual conglomeration of parallel film, interactive media, and music festivals and conferences organised jointly that takes place in mid-March in Austin, Texas, United States.
On January 20, Twitter announced its NFT profile picture feature for users and Instagram is about to go in that direction. Specifically, Zuckerberg said that the feature would be added in the near term, and NFTs would be mintable on Instagram hopefully within months.
“We’re working on bringing NFTs to Instagram in the near term. I’m not ready to kind of announce exactly what that’s going to be today. But 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.”
The rumours of Instagram implementing NFTs have been swirling for a long time, before a leak in July 2021 confirmed it. In December, Instagram’s leader Adam Mosseri said NFTs were actively being explored, and a Financial Times report in January cited two sources stating Meta was working on NFT features for its flagship social media applications, Facebook and Instagram, with the former featuring a marketplace.
At the same SXSW event, WWE Chief Brand Officer – Stephanie McMahon announced an NFT marketplace that would be launched just before WrestleMania 38 – WWE Moonsault.
The launch of the marketplace will be closely followed by WrestleMania 38, which is scheduled to take place on Saturday, April 2, and Sunday, April 3.
The marketplace will go live on the website wwemoonsault.com, where fans can now go and sign up for an email list for more information and regular updates. The marketplace is also welcoming the official WWE Universe Discord community.
Once live, fans will be able to hop onto the marketplace and use fiat currency or crypto to buy, trade, sell and store NFTs by creating a digital wallet powered by Eluvio.
WWE’s first venture in the crypto world was initiated with the launch of its Undertaker NFT collection during April 2021’s WrestleMania weekend. Following up on the release, the company dropped another collection of NFTs, this time featuring John Cena NFTs, during the SummerSlam weekend in 2021.
2021 also witnessed WWE signing a multi-year partnership with Fox Entertainment’s blockchain division, known as Blockchain Creative Labs. The two have collaborated to build a marketplace for officially licensed digital tokens and collectibles, similar to the NFT collections that WWE had previously launched.
NFTs have gone further from being a blurry pixel artwork to being adopted by the biggest industries from the world of media, art, sports, and gaming.
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