Web3 NFT Social Media
NFTs took the Blockchain by storm, and their rapid growth quickly made them one of the most prominent highlights of the Web3 community.
Indeed, the power of blockchain technology shines through in the news that Instagram and Facebook will now support the sharing of NFT (non-fungible tokens) and foster the adoption of Web3. This marks another significant step for the digital art and crypto industry, which are intrinsically linked.
Through the incredible opportunity the blockchain technology offers, creators around the world can now earn income from their work by using digital collectibles, like images and videos, music, or trading cards in the form of NFT.
Meta Believes in Web3
This announcement comes after a chaotic week for cryptocurrency and NFT markets as many investors have decided to cut ties with their crypto bags and long-term investments and many projects have suffered substantial losses in market value.
Web3 and NFTs are, however, seen by Meta as an investment going forward. Meta entered the Web3 and NFT economy with a plan to cast its net significantly wider and reap the benefits later down the line.
US Instagram NFT Launch
From this week onward, selected creators and collectors will be able to share their digital collectibles on Instagram, as Meta is preparing a pilot test with NFT fans in the United States.
ETH, SOL, MATIC & FLOW
As a start, Instagram will support Ethereum and Polygon, and later on Solana and Flow blockchain NFTs, along with a number of other NFT wallets.
Compatible NFT Wallets
Rainbow, MetaMask, and Trust Wallet are among the third-party wallets that will be compatible, with Coinbase Wallet, Dapper, and Phantom to follow.
Zero Fees
With Instagram NFT’s new picture-sharing capabilities, users will be able to share their art with the world and tag the artists and creators.
NFTs posts can be viewed in the same manner as videos and photos, and users will share them with others, either in DMS or via stories.
Users won’t be charged for using these NFT posting features, so they can freely display what they own on Instagram.
As a result of this, there will be no charge for uploading or posting an owner’s digital collectible on Instagram.
Digital Collectibles
The company announced it will begin testing digital collectibles with select U.S. creators and collectors who will be able to share NFTs they have created or purchased on Instagram. Features include:
- Digital wallet integration. When connected, creators and collectors will be able to select which NFTs they wish to share on Instagram.
- Digital collectibles sharing. A digital collectible, which is uploaded by a creator or collector, will exhibit a shimmer effect and display public information, such as the NFT’s description. Posts will also show up within user profile.
- Both creators and collectors will be automatically tagged. In the digital collectible post, the creator and collector will be automatically credited (based on their privacy settings).
Adam Mosseri, Instagram CEO
Last week, Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri revealed that Instagram has begun testing its NFT integration with a select number of creators, specifically in the United States.
A selected number of creators can now display their NFTs on their profiles. This integration will allow users to view which non-fungible token their favored influencer, artist, or even politician owns.
Instagram is starting small with this feature since it is a centralized company it wants to learn from the community to better itself before unleashing more features, what this means is that users, collectors, and creators can only view, share and engage with the NFTs.
“But Instagram is fundamentally a centralized platform, so there’s a tension there.
So one of the reasons why we’re starting small is we want to make sure that we can learn from the community.
We want to make sure that we work out how to embrace those tenets of distributed trust and distributed power, despite the fact that we are, yes, a centralized platform“
This Instagram NFT feature is crucial for the community; it allows artists to connect their digital wallets to their profiles and instantly keep their followers involved with any new work that has been done, as well as possibly sell it to their fans.
Adam Mosseri made a video on Twitter explaining the entire NFT integration; the CEO was sincerely focused on developing a new set of revenue for creators.
NFTs on Instagram 🎉
— Adam Mosseri (@mosseri) May 9, 2022
This week we’re beginning to test digital collectibles with a handful of US creators and collectors who will be able to share NFTs on Instagram. There will be no fees associated with posting or sharing a digital collectible on IG.
See you next week! ✌🏼 pic.twitter.com/VuJbMVSBDr
Facebook Web3 Polygon Blockchain
Meta has had an incredible week, and now they announce their plans to expand into the Web3 space by using the Polygon blockchain. Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, confirmed this week that Instagram will now allow NFTs.
Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta
“This week we’re starting to test digital collectibles on Instagram so creators and collectors can display their NFTs on their profile.”
Ryan Wyatt, Polygon CEO
Polygon CEO, Ryan Wyatt, announced the latest news about Meta and Polygon partnering up. Facebook opted for Polygon due to its carbon negative footprint, the scale it can offer, and its developer ecosystem.
🚨 We're excited to share that @Meta is partnering with @0xPolygon as they make their push into web3. 🚨
— Ryan Wyatt (@Fwiz) May 9, 2022
Facebook is choosing Polygon due to:
🌍 Our carbon-neutral footprint
⛓️ The scale we can offer
💻 The developer ecosystem choosing to build on Polygon. $MATIC 🤝 $FB pic.twitter.com/lk7D5ixgcB
Would Twitter join Web3?
With Twitter having been such a large part of the social media landscape for years, the company is no stranger to change. After all, if other social media giants are testing the Web3 waters, maybe Elon Musk would care to give Web3 initiative a whirl with Twitter? Well, it seems we’ll have to wait a bit more for the answer to that question since Elon Musk has other priorities at the moment.
Namely, Elon Musk said his $44 billion purchase of Twitter will not move ahead until he has more clarity on how many accounts are fake.
Twitter estimated in a filing earlier this month that fewer than 5% of its monetizable daily active users — known as mDAUs — during the first quarter were bots or spam accounts.
But Musk estimates that around 20% of the accounts on Twitter are fake or spam accounts and he’s concerned that the number could be even higher.
Elon Musk
“My offer was based on Twitter’s SEC filings being accurate,” Musk tweeted early Tuesday morning.
“Yesterday, Twitter’s CEO publicly refused to show proof of <5%. This deal cannot move forward until he does.”
20% fake/spam accounts, while 4 times what Twitter claims, could be *much* higher.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 17, 2022
My offer was based on Twitter’s SEC filings being accurate.
Yesterday, Twitter’s CEO publicly refused to show proof of <5%.
This deal cannot move forward until he does.
Just after Musk expressed his concerns, Twitter announced later Tuesday morning that it is committed to the deal at the pre-agreed price, adding that it has submitted a proxy filing to the SEC.
The company’s shares slipped 2.46% in pre-market trading on Tuesday.
Musk’s tweet comes just a few hours after Parag Agrawal, Twitter’s CEO, posted a lengthy thread about spam on the social network.
Parag Agrawal, Twitter CEO
Agrawal, a software engineer, said that Twitter’s spam estimates are based on multiple human reviews of thousands of accounts that are repeatedly sampled at random over time.
He said it’s not possible for external groups to calculate the exact number of spam accounts on the platform because it requires both public and private information that Twitter can’t share.
“Externally, it’s not even possible to know which accounts are counted as mDAUs on any given day,” he said.
Try for a lower price?
Analysts at Jefferies said Tuesday that Musk looks to be trying to drive down the price due to the recent market sell-off.
“Elon Musk’s recent comments suggest he is trying to negotiate a lower offer price,” equity analyst Brent Thill and equity associate James Heaney said in a research note.
“We believe that Musk is using his investigation into the % of fake TWTR accounts as an excuse to pay below $54.20/share. In reality, the NASDAQ COMP is down 25% YTD [year-to-date] and Elon Musk realizes that he may be overpaying for the asset.”
Musk’s analysis
Musk has said his team is conducting an analysis of the number of fake accounts on the platform. Still, experts in social media, disinformation, and statistical analysis say his suggested approach to further analysis is woefully deficient.
“To find out, my team will do a random sample of 100 followers of @twitter,” Musk tweeted on Friday. “I invite others to repeat the same process and see what they discover.”
He clarified his methodology in subsequent tweets, adding: “Pick any account with a lot of followers,” and “Ignore first 1000 followers, then pick every 10th. I’m open to better ideas.”
Musk also said, without providing evidence, that he picked 100 as the sample size number for his study because that’s the number Twitter uses to calculate the numbers in its earnings reports.
“Any sensible random sampling process is fine. If many people independently get similar results for % of fake/spam/duplicate accounts, that will be telling. I picked 100 as the sample size number, because that is what Twitter uses to calculate <5% fake/spam/duplicate.”
Carl T. Bergstrom, a University of Washington professor who co-wrote a book to help people understand data and avoid being taken in by false claims online, told CNBC that sampling 100 followers of any single Twitter account should not serve as “due diligence” for making a $44 billion acquisition.
He said that a sample size of 100 is far smaller that the norm for social media researchers studying similar issues and could result in selection bias.
Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz weighed in on the issue via his own Twitter account, pointing out that Musk’s approach is not actually random, uses too small a sample, and leaves room for massive errors.
Why is Meta using Polygon Blockchain?
Polygon is an Ethereum-based token that facilitates faster and cheaper transactions over layer-2 side chains (chains based on the Ethereum blockchain).
As part of its broad initiatives to encourage the adoption of Web 3.0 applications, Polygon has raised nearly $450 million in a funding round led by Sequoia Capital India.
Galaxy Digital, SoftBank Vision Fund 2, Galaxy Interactive, Republic Capital, Tiger Global, etc. also participated in the round. The funds will also enable Polygon to continue investing in cutting-edge zero-knowledge (ZK) technology critical to bringing the next billion users into Web 3.0.
By building upon the open-source principles of the Early Internet, the Web 3.0 initiative will enable users to create value while controlling the network, says Polygon Co-founder Sandeep Nailwal.
Developers Friendly
Polygon allows developers to create custom solutions similar to those offered by Amazon Web Services (AWS). It provides a scalable solution for every use case. Low fees and high transaction speeds are offered by Polygon PoS on the Ethereum mainnet, which is readily accessible in Web3.
Polygon Web3 Dominance
According to Sandeep Nailwal – Co-founder of Polygon, technological disruption didn’t begin with Web 2.0, and it won’t end there either.
Several of the same companies that had funded the previous innovation cycle have stepped forward this time to support the company’s Web 3.0 initiative.
Polygon hosts more than 7,000 decentralized applications (dApps), making it the leading platform for Web 3.0 development. Thousands of developers use Polygon’s scaling solutions in Ethereum ecosystems across a variety of applications.
Polygon: Carbon Negative
In April, Polygon announced a new plan, ‘The Green Manifesto,” to change their entire ecosystem. Polygon plans to move to a more sustainable era and aims to be ultimately carbon negative by the end of 2022.
They are introducing numerous measures, including creating a climate offset vertically within their ecosystem. They will focus on community initiatives and fund projects that use technology to combat climate change.
In fact, they have created a $20 million fund to ensure it works. Polygon’s carbon negative status is one of the primary reasons Meta has chosen Polygon as its primary blockchain going forward.
Polygon & ETH Meta NFT
In the announcement yesterday, Instagram confirmed that Polygon, alongside Ethereum, will feature upon the launch of their NFT integration.
Instagram announces that they will begin implementing NFTs into their platform using Polygon and Ethereum.
Moreover, in the blog, they said, “We understand that blockchain technology and NFTs raise important questions on sustainability. Meta will help reduce the emissions impact on Instagram by purchasing renewable energy.
Meta Polygon Web3 ZK technology
Polygon is also helping to move Web3 on, and Meta realizes this. The company is investing in brand new zero-knowledge (ZK) technology. Many believe ZK will also play a key role in introducing the world to Web3. This is huge because Meta has billions of daily users across its platforms.
Finally, in quarter two of 2022, Meta reported 2.87 billion people were using at least one of Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, or Messenger, daily.
Now by using Polygon, Meta will begin to introduce Web3 into these platforms, starting with Instagram.
What exactly is Web 3.0?
Tech, crypto, and VC enterprises have recently taken an interest in a new concept coined as Web3.
With the popularity of the Metaverse, Web 3.0 has become the new buzzword in the world of the Internet. A third version of the Internet, Web 3.0 is also known as the decentralized web and improves on the current Web 2.0 system. Today, Web 3 is heard everywhere, and if you don’t include it in your social profiles bio, you obviously don’t mean business.
Web3 is a term that encompasses a variety of ideas that aim to eliminate the middlemen from the Internet.
Moreover, you no longer have to log on to Facebook, Twitter, or Google to browse the internet in this news transdimensional virtual cyberworld. Web3 is an attempt to reclaim some of the power that has been lost.
Ideally, Web 3.0 will solve this problem as it is expected to be a Decentralized version of the Internet that allows users to manage and control their own data.
With the third version of the internet, there will be a greater degree of transparency and access to vast amounts of content for everyone.
Furthermore, Web 3.0 is expected to be more User-Centric, which will facilitate data security and privacy while reducing Internet hacking risk.
Blockchain technology is at the heart of Web 3.0. This is a type of electronic ledger, also known as a blockchain. A distributed ledger maintains a digital record of ownership (such as of assets) without the help of a centralized system.
As a distributed consensus protocol, it is considerably faster in closing transactions since there is no need for intermediaries to process and authenticate transactions.
As Blockchain relies on distributed consensus, changing data on the system isn’t easy without sending an alert to the whole ecosystem. The system is thus extraordinarily secure. Blockchain technology is a fundamental component of many major cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin, and non-fungible tokens.
Web 3.0 holds the potential to change the Internet we know today.
With this concept, peer-to-peer internet services are provided without a central authority, allowing users to be in control of their data.
Imagine it as a sort of bookkeeping where anyone has access to data on multiple computers at once. The data is searchable by anyone as it resides across many computers simultaneously.
Rather than being controlled by one organization, it is managed by users collectively. In exchange for participating, users receive tokens. As these tokens can be used to vote on decisions, they can also generate financial profit.
By using a single personalized account, users can bounce from social media to email to shopping, recording all their online activities on the Blockchain.
“To the average person, it does sound like voodoo,”
explained Olga Mack, professor of Blockchain and entrepreneur at UC Berkeley.
“But when you press a button to switch on lights, do you understand how electricity is made? You don’t have to know how electricity works to understand the benefits. The same is true of Blockchain.”
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