Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) come with a substantial carbon footprint. And while NFTs are yet another hot new trend that Meta seems eager to jump on, the technology conglomerate has apparently tempered its zeal with valid concerns about sustainability and its recent entrance into the world of digital assets.
On Tuesday, Meta issued a statement that offered a closer look at how NFTs will be incorporated into its photo and video sharing platform, Instagram. But amid all of the colorful screenshots of its limited-release NFT sharing feature, Meta did attempt to address the ecological-impact elephant in the room.
In the statement, Meta acknowledged that “blockchain technology and NFTs raise important questions on sustainability” and said that it plans to buy renewable energy as a way to “reduce the emissions impact that might be associated with the display of digital collectibles on Instagram.”
Then Meta added a link to a webpage dedicated to its sustainability endeavors. Beyond that, Meta did not provide much more detail about how much renewable energy it will purchase in response to the emissions impact of displaying (and popularizing) the creation and consumption of NFTs.
What we do know, based on what we saw on Meta’s sustainability website, is that Meta does indeed have a history of purchasing renewable energy as it currently has “contracts in place for more than 6.1 gigawatts of wind and solar energy across 18 states and five countries.”
Furthermore, Meta has said that its data centers are powered by “over 3.4 gigawatts of operating renewable energy projects.” So it is possible that Instagram’s parent company will make good on its promise to offset the carbon footprint of Instagram’s latest NFT-friendly feature.
Instagram’s new NFT sharing feature itself is expected to begin testing this week with a limited number of users in the U.S. and will involve linking Instagram accounts with a digital wallet, being able to display NFTs on a user’s profile, and the NFT posts themselves will feature “a shimmer effect” and “automatic tagging of both the creator and collector.”
At this time, the only blockchains supported by the feature are Ethereum and Polygon. Other blockchains, like Flow and Solana, will come later. Wallets that are currently compatible with the NFT feature include MetaMask, Trust Wallet, and Rainbow. Coinbase, Dapper, and Phantom are listed as “coming soon.”
Discord is trying to push more visibility on the internet for some of its biggest communities, and there's a good chance your messages could end up in a Google Search. The platform is preparing to make conversations from certain public servers searchable on the web, so there's a privacy setting you might want to check before the rollout begins.
According to Discord's official announcement, the changes will roll out in two stages. Starting November 16, qualifying servers will have public web pages featuring automated summaries of conversations. By mid-December, individual messages from eligible public channels could also appear word-for-word in Google and other search engines.
You just opened X and started typing your thoughts. Imagine the jump scare when a hand suddenly pops up on your screen, pointing at the promote button. It doesn’t say a word and simply points. For a growing number of X users, this isn’t a made-up scenario but something they have been seeing since yesterday, and very few of them are amused.
Most of us have learned to tune out the usual in-app upsells, whether it’s a glowing upgrade banner or a pop-up about a premium plan. A floating hand hovering over your draft is much harder to ignore, and that’s probably the whole point.
Scroll through any app for five minutes, and you’ll find someone maxxing something. Their skin, their sleep, their protein intake, even their Friday night on the couch. That little suffix has been everywhere this year, and now it has a trophy to show for it. In a recent announcement, Dictionary.com named maxxing its 2026 Word of the Year.
What are people actually doing when they’re maxxing?