Meta rolls out Instagram’s NFT feature in 100 countries but not in Europe!

The social networking giant will also add support for a variety of Web3 wallets. Despite widespread skepticism about NFTs among the general public, Meta is doubling down on its support for the technology.

The world’s largest social networking company announced Thursday that it will expand the digital collection feature it recently piloted on Instagram to 100 countries in Africa, Asia-Pacific, the Middle East and the Americas.

According to the announcement, the new feature will allow Instagram users to share the NFTs they own by connecting their digital wallets to the app. The extension initially supports Ethereum, Polygon and Flow NFTs, and Instagram plans to let users connect to Rainbow, MetaMask, Trust Wallet, Coinbase Wallet and Dapper Wallet. The feature will have no associated fees.

Meta showed early signs that it was ready to embrace Web3 last October when it rebranded to support the growth of the metaverse. Since then, the company has invested $10 billion in its metaverse arm, Reality Labs, and hired 1,000 people, but its plans for Web3 have remained mostly confidential. The company’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg had previously indicated that the company planned to support NFTs, and in May the company began rolling out the service to select creators in the United States. At the time, Mark Zuckerberg said of the update:

“We’re not just building a technology. We’re also trying to foster that ecosystem, because at the end of the day, we’re not going to be creating most of the content, not by a long shot. The vast majority of the content will be created by the creators in the ecosystem. And so I think a big part of what we need to do is really look at all the different ways that creators could make money.”

Meta’s blog post did not confirm whether Meta plans to launch this feature in Europe, or whether it plans to support NFTs on other blockchains like Solana.

Meta is one of the major tech players to show interest in NFTs as the technology develops, following the lead of Twitter and Reddit. However, while many companies are looking to support the technology, NFTs have been divisive as many skeptics have criticized the speculative nature of the market and the environmental impact of Proof-of-Work blockchains like Ethereum, where most NFTs are minted today. Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has also criticized Meta’s willingness to build the metaverse, though his criticism was of the vaguely defined concept of the metaverse itself. He said last week that while he believed the metaverse would grow, companies like Meta would “be wrong“trying to build it until there is a clear understanding of what people want to do with it.