Better late than Meta

Michael McClure
Marketing Operations Manager, Blokhaus.io

Meta has announced that it is ‘winding down’ support for NFTs on its social platforms after less than a year. The news has rattled digital artists and collectors alike, already battered by months of bad press in the NFT space. But far from being a disaster, Meta’s announcement could actually be a great thing for the Web3 art community. Why? Because it presents an opportunity for the community to guide the space in the direction we want to go, without big tech taking control.

Meta’s experiments with NFTs on Instagram and Facebook appear to have been at least a modest success, but clearly, they didn’t raise the company’s bottom line enough to survive what Mark Zuckerberg has termed ‘the year of efficiency’ (Meta had previously announced that it wouldn’t start taking a cut of sales until 2024). Predictably, a lot of crypto-haters are celebrating, while artists and collectors in the NFT community are upset by the decision, with many calling it shortsighted. The haters may well be proved right, but whether or not Zuckerberg and co. were influenced by mainstream negative sentiment about NFTs, the still uncertain regulatory landscape surrounding digital assets, or a combination of the two factors, at the end of the day this was a business decision.

Why would Meta spend a bunch of money integrating NFTs into its social platforms and building a metaverse that Web3 literate folks already know they’ll hate?

Let’s not beat around the bush – a large portion of the NFT community really doesn’t like Meta. Many among this group see Mark Zuckerberg and others like him as value extractors and regard his dream of a ‘closed’ metaverse (of which NFTs were to be a part) as antithetical to the ethos of Web3, which is built around the concept of decentralization, i.e., taking power away from companies like Meta, and putting it into the hands of creators and online communities. Acknowledging this fact, why would Meta spend a bunch of money right now, integrating NFTs into its social platforms and building a metaverse that Web3 literate folks (arguably the only people who really ‘get’ it) already know they’ll hate?

From Meta’s perspective, given that the whole world seems to be sick of anything which smells even faintly of crypto, and governments haven’t yet figured out how to regulate it, why not press pause for a while and see how things shake out? And if Meta’s scrapping of support for NFTs results in its talented developers looking for other opportunities within the wider Web3 workforce, so much the better. It’s happened before: Hot new blockchain Aptos was created by developers who had previously been employed by Meta on its now-defunct Diem project.

I don’t want my metaverse to be owned and moderated by a company exploiting creators and trying to collect as much data about me as possible

Sure, we’ll see Mark Zuckerberg’s metaverse eventually, but to understand how antithetical it is to the original hopes for the movement, you only need to look at the company's announcement of platform fees for metaverse item creators - a whopping 47.5%. I don’t want my metaverse to be owned and moderated by a company that wants to monetize creators and tries to collect as much data about me as possible, and I’m sure other digital artists and collectors feel the same way. 

For an example of the potential of a better Web3 space, check out HERE & NOW, which is about to open its 5th iteration. Billed as ‘not just a gallery [...] a sensory experience’, the HAN project hosts various community galleries, which function as virtual spaces for the community to meet, share ideas, and cultivate their own shows. HAN empowers emerging artists, gives value to its participants through games and experiences, and was built by developers who are deeply embedded within the digital art community. They recently partnered with generative art platform fxhash, which was also founded by a member of the Tezos blockchain community. 

I suggest that Web3 communities will never have a better opportunity than now, while big tech has its back turned, to step up and build the kind of platforms and metaverse experiences that they actually want to be a part of. They should consider this time to be an extension on a homework assignment, to build better and more open Web3 experiences, which are true to the ethos of decentralization – they might not get another.

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Blokhaus is a marketing and communications agency with a focus on Web3 and emerging tech. Since we were founded in 2021, Blokhaus has supported numerous high-profile projects and activations around the globe, working in partnership with some of the biggest brands in the world. To learn more about our work, check out our Case Studies. To get in touch, visit our Contact Us page.