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Instagram is opening up the platform to NFTs, paving the way for mainstream visibility and approaching the promise of digital fashion wearables.
After testing in May, Instagram’s digital collections feature, which allows people to share NFTs on their feeds, will be rolled out to people in more than 100 countries, the Meta-owned company said on Thursday. People can share images of their NFTs by linking their crypto wallets and tag creators and owners. Crypto wallets Coinbase and Dapper are now supported in addition to MetaMask, Rainbow and Trust Wallet.
The feature brings NFTs to a wider audience: Instagram reports an estimated 2 billion monthly active users and is well within the wheel of fashion and beauty brands. These industries are starting to experiment with NFTs, whose community currently resides mainly on Twitter and Discord – a brand that sells NFTs will gain more reach and awareness on Instagram. Gucci, for example, has nearly 49 million followers on Instagram, but just over 56,000 on the Gucci Vault Discord server.
For creators and brands, more visibility means more learning and potential monetization opportunities, because of faster visibility and engagement, says photographer Sophia Wilson, who took part in the experiment.
“The NFT community has become a very white and male-dominated place, which we hate to see happen in any other art space,” says Wilson. “If you’re just scrolling through Instagram and you see an NFT, all of a sudden it looks really awesome, and you can conceptualize what it is.”
According to Insider Intelligence, only a quarter of US adults know about NFTs, up from 11 percent a year ago, indicating that there may be more interest in the technology.
