NFT resurgence

Gm, everyone. Welcome to October and spooky season! For most of the globe, the scariest thing about the past couple of weeks was the US dollar, rising at a breathtaking pace and making stuff more expensive for everyone who isn’t paid in USD. Days like this remind us why folks from every country have an interest in what's happening in crypto, even if they’re not stacking sats right now.

Today’s lineup: NFTs on Instagram, the SWIFT blockchain experiment, and CryptoPunk madness. Let’s get into it.

—Angelina & Vincent

Instagram has the Kardashians and… NFTs?

You love to hate it and hate to love it, from EmRata to #foodporn: Instagram. But with a new crypto tie-in, Instagram is making an effort to become more than just the platform for stalking your high school crush. It’s becoming an NFT gallery.

Millions of U.S. users can now show off their monkey JPEGs on Instagram after parent company Meta rolled out its long-awaited NFT integration last Thursday. The feature has been in testing since May and is part of Meta’s larger creator monetization strategy, which is attempting to turn NFTs into a cash cow.

Here’s what’s new:

• Connecting a digital wallet. Users can connect their Instagram accounts to MetaMask, Rainbow, and Trust wallets (Coinbase Wallet, Dapper, and Phantom are coming soon).

• Sharing NFTs. Collectors and creators can post NFTs to their profiles, complete with a shimmer effect to set it apart from a typical grid post.

• Automatic tagging of creator and collector. Their information is sourced from public blockchain data on Ethereum and Polygon (with Solana and Flow coming soon).

• Cross-posting NFTs to Facebook. If anyone’s still using Facebook.

Why it’s a big deal: Remember when Twitter integrated NFTs just a few months ago? Instagram doing the same is more exciting because 1) it brings NFTs to a huge mainstream audience and 2) the ‘Gram is where influencers are at. NFTs are about empowering creators, so it makes sense to go where the creators are… which is on Instagram. Compared to Insta’s more than 1 billion users, Twitter’s 396 million users is small potatoes.

Bottom line: Instagram is a visual platform perfect for showcasing NFTs. But the timing of the rollout isn’t optimal—the current bear market isn’t particularly NFT-friendly. So we might have to wait for the next bull run to see the new feature take off.

But when it does, we’re sure Meta won’t stop there. After all, what good is simply looking at NFTs when you could buy them on Insta too? Just a heads up, OpenSea…

Moving SWIFTly into the future

Like building a strong relationship or moving a couch up a flight of stairs, executing global financial transactions requires good communication. That’s why a global bank messaging system called SWIFT has engaged Chainlink to develop a protocol for allowing blockchains to talk to each other and transfer digital assets across multiple chains, the companies announced this week.

The announcement is the first of a set of experiments that SWIFT said it would embark on in the first quarter of this year to support tokenized assets and central bank digital currencies.

What’s SWIFT? It’s an interbank messaging system that enables cross border payments. In its tie-in with Chainlink, SWIFT is working on a proof of concept for a Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP). The CCIP would allow the 11,000 financial institutions on SWIFT to move tokenized assets across several blockchains.

In the crypto world, these connections are called bridges. This is important: Bridges between blockchains are one of the parts of the crypto ecosystem most vulnerable to hackers. So far this year, $2 billion has been stolen in cross-chain bridge hacks.

What this could mean, if successful: Banks wouldn’t have to worry about their bridges being attacked if they choose to offer crypto payments services. And SWIFT won’t have to build individual connections to different blockchains to serve what could be the financial ecosystem of the future.

What Bear Market?

Even when the going gets tough, it’s important to remember:

That’s probably what one anonymous buyer thought to himself when he bought CryptoPunk #2924 last Thursday for 3,300 ETH (worth $4.5 million at the time).

Marking the fourth largest NFT sale of all time for the CryptoPunks collection, the purchase had crypto Twitter all riled up.

Why? The sale’s timing illustrates that blue-chip NFTs are still in demand as an alternate investment class, despite bear market conditions. So maybe NFTs aren’t dead yet after all…

In other news:

• Traders can pretend it's 2021 and trade fake NFTs in a new fantasy league that doesn’t require actual investment.

• Indian crypto exchange WazirX buckled under the weight of India’s new crypto tax laws and fired 40% of its staff.

• The story of Tokenize Xchange in Singapore during this bear market: Make an acquisition, hire hundreds more staff, and raise $1 billion.

• The CFTC has come forward with its second crypto-related suit in recent weeks, this time against the founder of crypto futures exchange Digitex for operating what the regulator says was an illegal derivatives trading platform.

• Solana suffered another outage. This is the fourth major outage since January.

And that’s what you need on your radar this week in crypto. Whether you’re trading real or fake NFTs this week, we hope you do your research and tune in again on Friday. See ya then.