In March of this year, we wondered which platform Instagram would choose to introduce its NFT market. Yesterday, the company made it public that Polygon (MATIC) is the chain of choice. It's not surprising that MATIC rose on the news. After a pump of 15%, it retraced a bit, following the general bad sentiment in crypto and stocks.

Insta's upcoming ('soon') toolkit for NFTs will allow artists to create and launch their own NFTs and sell them to fans. At first, only a select group of artists and content creators will have access to the toolkit. The creators mint their NFTs on Instagram and sell them either on Instagram or other platforms. NFTs that were bought elsewhere can be displayed in Insta. 

At launch, Instagram will use Polygon for minting the NFT. Instagram has also added support for NFTs on Solana. 

Why NFT's on Insta?

Why is Instagram diving in the NFT game? It's parent company Meta, formerly known as Facebook, is betting heavily on the metaverse. Instagram itself originated as a platform that deals exclusively with photos and images. It makes sense to give users the ability to not just display but also own and trade the ownership of these images. After all, it's a way that creators can make money. If Meta/Instagram won't give the artists this opportunity, they will run.

Bullish for MATIC

When Facebook did a pilot with displaying NFT's in July of 2022, they chose Polygon, which is an Ethereum Layer 2 scalability solution. It's cheaper to use than Ethereum but relies on Ethereum's security. Apparently, it was a fruitful partnership. 

Polygon has recently seen more adoption by big players. Reddit, for example, let users mint 2 million NFTs, also minted on Polygon.

Recent Polygon news came from an unexpected corner. Big bank JP Morgan executed its first defi trade - a test trade - on Polygon. It was part of a pilot program to “explore potential decentralized finance (DeFi) applications in wholesale funding markets.” The trade involved tokenized Singaporean dollar and Japanese yen deposits. It's quite ironic that the bank of which the CEO still calls Bitcoin a ponzi, is doing defi trades right under his nose.