(Kitco News) - Social media platforms have been instrumental in generating momentum in the crypto market as of late, with Elon Musk’s Twitter helping drive the price of Dogecoin (DOGE) higher since last week and now Meta getting in on the action to help bolster a pair of cryptos.
On Wednesday, the technology conglomerate revealed that it intends to use the Polygon (MATIC) network to allow users of Instagram to create and launch their own nonfungible tokens (NFTs) via an “end-to-end toolkit.”
“A small group of creators will soon be able to create digital collectibles (NFTs) and sell them right on Instagram,” said Meta’s Head of Commerce and Fintech Stephane Kasriel in a blog post.
The creator economy is forecasted to reach more than $100 billion in the future, according to Kasriel, who said that the new digital economy will need to be more interoperable and portable than the present-day web if it is to achieve that level of growth.
Meta’s goal with the new service is to help creators earn a living, so it won’t be charging fees in its digital collectible marketplace until 2024 and will cover all blockchain-related gas costs. After the initial testing, the new features will be expanded to additional countries.
Following the revelation of the new integration, MATIC's price spiked 17.75% from a low of $0.837 to a high of $0.985 in early trading on Thursday before entering consolidation near $0.95.
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Integrating permanent storage
The second token to benefit from being integrated with Meta’s Instagram is Arweave (AR), a decentralized storage network that seeks to offer a platform for the indefinite storage of data. The protocol matches people who have hard drive space to spare with those who need to store data or host content permanently.
Meta is looking to utilize the protocol to permanently store digital collectibles from Instagram.
"Instagram users are now able to issue digital collectibles for their posts, stored on Arweave," Sam Williams, founder of Arweave, tweeted on Thursday.
Following the announced integration, the AR token saw its price skyrocket 80.1% from $9.92 to a high of $17.87 before profit-taking led to a retrace to support near $15.25.
The news of Arweave’s integration followed the prior announcement about the integration with Polygon for minting NFTs and is meant to help facilitate adoption by providing users with a place where they can store their NFTs without worrying that they could lose access.
The two developments together show that Meta is serious about helping to expand the NFT creator economy.
“It’s still early for the NFT market compared to where we think it’s going,” Kasriel said. “By making NFTs easier to use natively on Instagram, we’re opening up new ways for the billions of people who use our apps to connect with and support their favorite creators — which, in turn, unlocks more economic opportunity.”
