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"We're trying to bring NFT to Instagram in the near future," Zuckerberg said during the South by Southwest Festival in Austin, Texas. However, the Facebook founder did not give specifics on when this would be implemented.
Casey Newton, author of Platformer, said on twitter about the festival that Zuckerberg hopes that in the coming months, Instagram users will be able to cast their own NFT on the platform.
At #SXSW, Mark Zuckerberg just said that “hopefully” in the coming months you’ll be able to mint NFTs within Instagram
— Casey Newton (@CaseyNewton) March 15, 2022
In October 2021, Meta changed its name from Facebook to focus on its metaverse projects. The company's financial statements from the fourth quarter of 2021 revealed for the first time that its virtual reality and augmented reality research and development project, Reality Labs, lost more than $10 billion. To be fair, Metaverse's Metaverse hasn't officially launched yet, so it's hard to profit from the platform.
This isn't Meta's first cryptocurrency project. In 2019, the company also revealed plans for "Libra," which was later renamed "Diem," a stablecoin anchored in dollars. However, the plan failed because of a lack of regulatory censorship and community opposition. The project was later acquired by Silvergate Capital, although many former employees at Meta are building their own networks in an effort to revive the open-source stablecoin.
Social networking companies are trying to add cryptocurrencies and NFT to their platforms following Twitter's famous decision to support NFT profile pictures in January 2022. Reddit has deployed NFT profile pictures from their collection, and OnlyFans allowed NFT profile pictures in December 2020.
It's not just the giant social networking platforms that are trying to seize the cryptocurrency opportunity. Traditional financial firms have also expressed interest in the sector. According to the filings of American Express, a major credit card company, it is intent on expanding into the Metaverse platform.
Applications submitted to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office this week show That American Express is willing to provide banking and virtual transaction services, cryptocurrency services, and allow the use of its credit cards in the NFT market.
