Facebook starts testing NFTs with select creators

NEW DELHI: Facebook has rolled out a test to support non-fungible tokens (NFTs) with a select group of creators in the US on its platform, as it aspires to capture the multi-billion dollar metaverse industry.

Navdeep Singh who is a product manager at Meta (formerly Facebook) shared screenshots of NFTs on Facebook late on Thursday.

"We're launching NFTs on Facebook! Excited to share what I've been working on with the world," he posted.

Last month, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that NFTs will soon arrive on Instagram.

Addressing one of the sessions at the 'South By Southwest's event, Zuckerberg said that "over the next several months, the ability to bring some of your NFTs in, hopefully over time be able to mint things within that environment".

The Meta CEO said that "a bunch of technical things that need to get worked out before that'll really be seamless to happen."

"We're working on bringing NFTs to Instagram in the near term," the Meta Founder said at an event.

"Similar functionality is coming to Facebook soon, along with augmented reality NFTs on Instagram Stories via Spark AR so you can place digital art into physical spaces," he earlier announced.

Instagram Head Adam Mosseri said that the team was "actively exploring NFTs" but didn't have further details.

In a video, Mosseri said a small group of US users will get to display NFTs on their feed, stories and in messages.

Clicking on the tag called "digital collectibles" will showcase details like the name of the creator and the NFT owner.

"I want to acknowledge upfront that NFTs and blockchain technologies and Web3 more broadly are all about distributing trust, distributing power," Mosseri said in the video.

"But Instagram is fundamentally a centralised platform, so there's a tension there," he added, adding that support for NFTs on Instagram may popularise the technology further.