“We are working on bringing NFTs to Instagram in the short term,” he said during an interview at the South by Southwest conference on Tuesday, but declined to share details on when and how the feature might. function. Zuckerberg spent most of the nearly 50-minute long conversation about the so-called Metaverse, his vision for a more immersive version of the internet.

Former Meta executive David Marcus said last August that the company was considering building NFT features alongside the company’s Novi digital wallet. At the SXSW conference, held in Austin, Texas, Zuckerberg also addressed the war in Ukraine, calling it a “massively destabilizing global event” – his first public comments since the conflict began last month, the Bloomberg report says.

According to The edgeInstagram manager Adam Mosseri said last year that the team was “actively exploring NFTs” but had made no real announcements. In January, we heard a report that Facebook and Instagram teams were working on NFT integrations. The report mentions that there has been progress on features allowing you to use an NFT as a profile and create NFTs on the platform and discussions on creating a marketplace.

Instagram won’t be the first major social network with NFT integration. Earlier this year, Twitter introduced a feature that allows certain users to set an NFT they own as their profile picture. They then appear as hexagons, and anyone interested can click through to see the NFT’s metadata. Given how often TikTok features end up as a near-carbon copy on Instagram, it wouldn’t be surprising to see Meta’s photo-sharing (er, “entertainment”) app do something similar.