Did Pinterest just fix one of NFT’s biggest problems?
Pinterest gets a new lease of life as the visual discovery engine company takes out a patent on technology for authenticating NFTs. Blockchain enthusiasts may not be at the top of your list for an untapped audience for Pinterest, but they may soon be just that. According to Nat Rubio-Licht’s Patent Drop Report, Pinterest’s NFT authentication technology works by comparing a “candidate NFT” or one that a user officially wants to create on the blockchain with other existing NFTs that have similar characteristics. This helps to confirm ownership and prevent plagiarism by ensuring that the user does not duplicate a part that already exists. (This is the whole point of NFTs, to begin with, with “NF” meaning non-fungible, or not replicable, as opposed to forms of cryptocurrency.)
“While the existence of NFTs on a blockchain provides the ability to track NFTs and determine the history and ownership of the NFTs, there is currently no way to authenticate that the data represented or pointed to by the NFTs is authentic and/or unique to that NFT, ” Pinterest said in its application. Pinterest hasn’t officially announced its foray into the world of NFTs and blockchains, but it certainly wouldn’t be the first social media site to take the plunge.
Last year, both Twitter and Instagram added NFT-based features, with Twitter adding NFT Tweet Tiles and Instagram releasing a number of NFT-based tools. With Pinterest taking a big step into e-commerce (with the goal of making every pin shoppable in the app) it’s not surprising that they would take their new features one step further to try and become a major player in the NFT space . Pinterest must evolve to compete with social media giant Meta.
Pinterest also faces the difficulties of having a more niche audience unlike social media like Instagram or Twitter.
At first it doesn’t seem to make sense that Pinterest would take on NFTs, but Pinterest is an image sharing site and art can easily be recreated thousands of times without ever crediting the original creator. So by using blockchain to track a creator of an artwork, Pinterest can actually help prevent art theft and make artists and content creators more comfortable creating for and sharing to the site. This move not only ensures content creation for the site but also keeps Pinterest in the modern age.
