You know it’s a crypto bear market when one of the largest companies in the world announces it’s enabling NFT trading on the Polygon blockchain and… pffft… price-action fizzer.

With apologies to “DeFi Dad” for that remark, which was inspired by his tweet, below.

The crypto content maker and “DeFi educator” was referencing the news that one of Meta’s social-media platform beasts, Instagram, is developing NFT minting and trading functionality in its app via the Polygon blockchain – available “soon”.

He was also noting the fact Polygon’s token MATIC hasn’t yet seen the sort of pump (currently about +4%) normally expected from such an adoption-positive revelation.

Maybe investors have simply just been slow to catch on amid all the Fed’s interest-rate-hiking consternation.

 

Update: It seems investors have indeed now caught on. MATIC has surged since this article was published and is now up more than 13% over the past 24 hours. Also, in related news, JPMorgan has completed its first DeFi based trade on a public blockchain – Polygon! We’ll look at that more closely tomorrow. 

 

Tabs on MATIC’s price aside, Zuckerberg’s company made the announcement overnight (AEDT) during its “Creator Week” with the words:

“Creators will soon be able to make their own digital collectibles [NFTs] on Instagram and sell them to fans, both on and off Instagram. They’ll have an end-to-end toolkit — from creation (starting on the Polygon blockchain) and showcasing, to selling.”

Meta says that it will roll out the new NFT features to a select group of artists and content creators first up,  before opening up the features to a wider audience.

Those creators will include Amber Vittoria, Refik Anadol, Jason Seife, Dave Krugman among several others.

Meta has been experimenting with NFTs on Instagram and Facebook since last year but till now, Instagram users have only been able to simply display them.

At launch, Instagram will use the Polygon blockchain for NFT minting and the app will also pull metadata from OpenSea for the purpose of viewing collection names and other relevant info on Instagram.

Meta also revealed it will allow video-based digital collectibles to be shown on its platform and will look to add support for the Solana blockchain and the Solana-based Phantom wallet.

The tech giant wrote that it won’t be charging fees for displaying and sharing the NFTs on Instagram or Facebook and it also won’t charge any additional fees for selling digital collectibles until at least 2024.

It added, however, that “digital collectible purchases made within the Instagram app on the Android and iOS operating systems are subject to applicable app store fees”.

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