After two months of high-profile publicity, Instagram has finally begun officially testing the NFT display feature.
Currently, the feature is only available to select US creators and collectors. According to the official announcement, test users can connect their digital wallets to Instagram to see their digital collections.
Blockchain networks supported by Instagram currently include Ethereum and Polygon, and Flow, Solana, etc. will be supported in the future. Judging from the announcement published by Meta, the core of this feature for now only includes the display of NFTs and not the creation or trading of NFTs.
Back in March of this year, Zuckerberg announced that Instagram was preparing to launch a feature to display digital collections. It was not until two months later that the feature was officially tested, and another social giant, Twitter, introduced a similar feature earlier. In January, Twitter introduced NFT showcases for Twitter Blue subscribers in the iOS version, where users can post their NFTs as the cover image of their profile.
NFT is a digital token that represents ownership of a unique object that is indivisible and irreplaceable, which also distinguishes it from cryptocurrencies. Because of this characteristic of NFT, plagiarism or misappropriation can be effectively prevented, which is why it is highly valued by artists, collectors, and others.
In March 2021, Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey sold the NFT of Twitter’s first tweet for $2.9 million. Due to the huge transaction volume and secrecy of the blockchain, NFT began to enter the public domain, and NFT transaction volume gradually increased.
According to statistics from the data website NonFungible, the number of global NFT transactions in a single day will reach a peak of about 225,000 in 2021, and the number of active wallets in a single day will be nearly 120,000. The base price of one of the hottest NFT projects, the “Boring Ape” series, has increased from 0.08 ETH to 147 ETH (Ether, 1ETH=$1907), a price increase of 1837 times.
However, as the Fed’s monetary policy gradually tightened, investors began to turn to more defensive stocks, and overly speculative products like NFTs gradually cooled, the daily turnover of NFTs fell 92% from its peak in early May this year, and the number of daily active wallets fell 88% from its peak.
The imbalance between supply and demand has also further dampened enthusiasm for NFTs. According to analytics firm Chainalysis, there were 1.8 million buyers worldwide at the end of April this year, and about 9.2 million NFTs were sold, with each holding about 5 NFTs.
Many NFT owners are finding that their assets are slowly becoming “worthless.” According to the data monitoring website NFTGo.io, the global NFT scale has shrunk 53.4% in the last 7 days. The first tweeted NFT was auctioned earlier this year, and the auction price did not exceed $14,000, with a depreciation rate of more than 99.5%.
However, there are fluctuations in any market, and many participants still believe that NFTs will continue to develop. For example, Coinbase, the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the United States, launched a beta version of its NFT trading platform last month with more than 4 million registrations.
