meta announced on Thursday that it will give anyone in the US the ability to share “digital collectibles” (read: NFTs under a new name that social media executives say is more appealing) on Facebook and Instagram. Sharing on the latter platform is also available in over 100 other countries. Initially limited to select users, the feature works by linking your crypto wallet to your profile, after which you can create a message with the NFTs in that wallet. According to a blog post by Meta, sharing a digital collectible results in “automatically tagging the creator and collector”.
If you go to Settings > Digital Collectibles in the Instagram app, you’ll see that there are currently five wallets supported if you try to use the feature on your phone, including Coinbase’s wallets, MetaMask, and Dapper. The app says you can connect different wallets if you’re using the web version of Instagram on a desktop, but when I tried it, clicking the Digital Collectibles button would just take me back to my feed on the Instagram homepage.
However, I don’t suspect many people will care about the details of sharing NFTs on Instagram or Facebook, and I bet the feature will be similar to that U2 album that invaded iPhones many years ago: something that you while digging and say “oh, yeah, that.” As Bloomberg noticed earlier this week, NFT trading has fallen sharply this year from its peak this summer. Overall, both the number and value of NFT sales this year were significantly lower than in 2021, according to data from NonFungible.com.
All this despite efforts to try and give the general public the digital tokens. Last month, as Meta began expanding access to this feature, Eminem and Snoop Dogg gave a Bored Ape Yacht Club-themed performance at MTV’s VMAs. Since then, the average selling price, market cap, number of sales, and the number of people trading NFTs in that collection have all fallen by double digits, according to data from DappRadar.
