Instagram will become a new NFT marketplace

Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) have been a real hit since 2021, but now it seems like the interest is slowly fading away. Despite this fact, the popular social network Instagram is about to enable the creation and trading of NFTs for selected creators. Their main purpose is to provide “new and improved ways for creators to make a living” on the platform.

Until now, indeed, it was already possible for some users in around 100 countries to share their already-bought NFT-er on Instagram. The function let the users connect their wallets to view and share their collections there —from Ethereum, Flow, Solana, and Polygon. Now, it’ll also be possible to create, buy, and sell NFTs from the last blockchain on Instagram.

This isn’t available worldwide yet, but only for some users with professional accounts in the US. The sent NFTs are reviewed in a process that could last 48 hours, and, if passed, they can’t be edited anymore. The Instagram team expects to expand this NFT feature gradually to other countries.

In addition, as indicated by Stephane Kasriel (Head of Commerce and Financial Technologies at Meta), they’re preparing support for Solana and Phantom and integrations with OpenSea and Arweave. Besides, Meta won’t charge any minting fee until 2024, and it’ll cover gas fees for buyers.

All of this can be a major boost for NFTs and Polygon, given that Instagram currently counts around $1.4 billion users worldwide. Since the announcement, Polygon (MATIC) has increased by over 50% [CMC].  

NFT trading decreases, but there’s still interest

The last DappRadar report discovered a decrease of 30% in NFT trading volume during October, sammenlignet to September. As they described it, this is the lowest amount registered this year. That’s no wonder: previously, data compiled by Dune Analytics showed a sharp decrease of 97% in NFT trading volume since its peak in January 2022.

Not taking those figures too seriously, supporters of digital collectibles persist worldwide. Beyond Instagram, they had an NFT London conference this past week, even featuring their own NFT vending machine. It was possible to pay around $11 in exchange for pieces from collections like Dr. Who Worlds Apart, Thunderbirds, and Delft Blue Night Watch. The proceeds will be donated to Giveth and Roald Dahl’s Marvellous Children’s Charity.

Inside the online world, the new NFT collection Art Gobblers raised at least $20 million during its first 24h in the Blur marketplace. It’s likely not the only project having success. If we check the big tokens related to NFTs now, we’ll see they’ve been increasing steadily during the last week, specially Chiliz (+27%), Axie Infinity (+22%), and The Sandbox (+17%).

Maybe that’s why British lawmakers are looking now in this direction. Just recently, the UK Digital, Culture, Media and Sports committee (DCMS) kunngjort that they’ll “hold an inquiry into the operation, risks, and benefits of NFTs and the wider blockchain”. But it seems that more regulation is coming from there.

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