Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta (Facebook’s parent company), has confirmed that non-fungible tokens (NFTs) will be integrated in the Instagram app “hopefully” soon.

The metaverse-digging, monochrome T-shirt-wearing, Lego-haired CEO was speaking on Tuesday at the South by Southwest interactive media and entertainment conference in Austin, Texas.

Zuckerberg said Meta was “working on bringing NFTs to Instagram in the near term,” adding: “Over the next several months, [we’ll have] the ability to bring some of your NFTs in… hopefully over time [we’ll] be able to mint things within that environment.”

Zuckerberg also said he hopes that one day that users will be able to mint the clothes of their digital avatars as NFTs, but admitted there is still work to do before that can happen.

He’s spoken on this topic a number of times before, in fact, on the popular Lex Fridman podcast, for instance…

In January, a Financial Times report cited two sources stating Meta was working on NFT features for its leading social media applications, Facebook and Instagram. And on January 31, Meta joined the nonprofit Crypto Open Patent Alliance (COPA) that has a chief aim to “remove patents as a barrier to growth and innovation.”

By joining COPA, Meta has effectively agreed not to enforce crypto-related patents, thus embracing the open-sourced ethos of the wider crypto community. COPA was founded by Jack Dorsey’s Block, formerly Square, Inc., and consists of more than 30 members, including MicroStrategy, Kraken and Uniswap.

“I once caught an NFT this big,” Mark Zuckerberg probably didn’t say. (Getty Images)

 

Team behind Diem raises US$200m for new project Aptos

In 2019, Zuckerberg and Facebook attempted to launch a digital stablecoin called Libra, later dubbed Diem, which famously ended up hitting a regulatory and political brick wall.

That initiative was finally laid to rest earlier this year, however, it’s been revealed that several former Meta staffers who worked on Diem have now raised US$200 million to develop and expand a new blockchain project known as Aptos.

The round was led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) with Multicoin Capital, 3 Arrows Capital, Tiger Global, FTX Ventures, Coinbase Ventures and more also contributing.

“Since departing Meta (formerly Facebook) we have been able to put our ideas into motion, ditch bureaucratic red tape, and build an entirely new network,” Aptos stated, adding: “our mission is to create universal and fair access to decentralised assets for billions of people.”

The Aptos team is building a decentralised layer-1 blockchain partly based on Move, which is the coding language that was developed for Diem.

The funding will reportedly be used to hire new staff and to support “companies, brands and builders” who are looking to develop projects on the Aptos blockchain. Apparently Aptos DeFi, NFT, Web3 social media and payments applications are already in the early stages of development.

Read MoreCryptocurrencyNFT

You might be interested in