This week’s Web 3.0 woundup features Instagram going deeper into the NFT black hole, Opensea turning the screws on scammers and the Tomb Raider creators making an NFT experience.
Instagram to Offer NFT Trading
Instagram has been on a bit of an NFT trip over the past few months, resulting in this week’s news that NFT trading is coming to the platform. Instagram first announced plans to integrate NFTs around a year ago, launching a trial six months ago, much to the displeasure of some.
This appears to have been successful as the platform this week announced that NFT trading would soon be possible, echoing a similar move from Twitter just days before. The move is no surprise in some ways seeing as Instagram owner Meta is diving headfirst into Web 3.0, meaning that more such leaps can be expected in the coming years.
Open(sea) Up – This is the Police!
Opensea has been taking steps to stem the flow of users abandoning it for other platforms in recent months, and the latest of these has come in the form of better policing. The biggest (still) NFT platform announced a couple of anti-fraud measures this week to make the platform safer for users – a feature that monitors the behavior of smart contracts and can tell whether they intend to steal NFTs, and a second tool that can identify copied NFTs and prevent their sale, even if the user has changed the dimensions.
This should increase the trust that users have in the platform, though whether these and other measures, such as the enabling of bulk NFT minting and buying, will help stem the flow of users to other platforms remains to be seen.
Tomb Raider Creator Set to Make NFT Game
The studio behind gaming phenomenon Tomb Raider announced this week that it is working on its first NFT game, Symbiogenesis. Square Enix has billed the game as “brand-new entertainment content”, which will span collectible art and the narrative form, taking place in a self-contained world with a wide cast of characters, all of which can be collected as digital art.
Players can use the characters as social media avatars as well as taking them on an unfolding journey where they “’untangle’ a mystery by completing missions that revolve around questions of the monopolization and distribution of resources.”
To date, NFT games haven’t really been much cop, but with big names such as Square Enix now getting involved, there’s every hope that the genre can start to take off. Just change the name, Jesus.
