May 9 (UPI) -- A small group of U.S. collectors and creators will display their non-fungible tokens this week on Instagram, the social networking service's chief confirmed in a video on Monday.
Instagram head Adam Mosseri said in a video posted to his Twitter page that the move was part of the social networking's service's goal to support creators ability to make a profit.
"Creators are incredibly important to Instagram, but one of the challenging things that we need to solve as an industry is how to help creators make a living doing what they love," Mosseri said in the video.
"We think one really interesting opportunity for a subset of creators is NFTs -- the idea of owning a unique digital item. So, what we're starting with this week is the ability for creators and people to share NFTs that they've made or that they've bought either in Feed or in Stories or in messaging," Mosseri said.
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"It's a limited number of people to start, and there's a lot more functionality that we're going to need to build over time, but we wanted to start small and learn from the community," he added.
Mosseri was also transparent in the video about tension between Instagram and the decentralized ethos of Web3, which he said was another reason to start with a small group.
"I want to acknowledge upfront that NFTs and blockchain technologies and Web3 more broadly are all about distributing trust, distributing power," Mosseri said. "But Instagram is fundamentally a centralized platform, so there's a tension there."
CEO Mark Zuckerberg of Instagram's parent company Meta confirmed that the company will start testing digital collectibles on Instagram this week in a Facebook post, adding that similar functionality is coming to Facebook soon.
