Meta Pins Web3 Hopes on Instagram Creators Minting NFTs

Instagram users can soon create and sell NFTs in the app

article-image

Source: Shutterstock

share

Meta’s latest blockchain offering will let a select group of US creators on Instagram mint NFTs and sell the digital assets directly via the social media platform.

The company said it won’t charge any service fees until 2024 and will cover any gas costs incurred by both creators and collectors for the time being. However, any in-app purchases of NFTs are still subject to applicable Android and iOS app store fees.

With this move, Instagram has essentially become an NFT marketplace, comparable to crypto-native platforms such as OpenSea, Rarible or Magic Eden. Those marketplaces, however, do charge service fees.

OpenSea, for example, takes a 2.5% cut of the sale price. Creating or listing an item is free of charge. Rarible, on the other hand, takes 1% on the buyer side and 1% on the seller side from every sale. And Magic Eden takes 2% on all transactions.

Meta has not yet announced an NFT royalty scheme for secondary sales, but given the recent wave of marketplaces going royalty-optional, including Magic Eden, SudoSwap and LooksRare, it may choose to jump on the bandwagon.

Going fee free is not the usual style of tech giants, especially for Meta. Its Horizon Worlds virtual reality (VR) video game will reportedly charge users a fee of 47.5% built in to the cost of Meta Quest Store apps and games. This figure includes a hardware platform fee of 30% for Meta’s VR Meta Quest.

Meta’s Reality Labs division in charge of producing metaverse-related technology keeps seeing heavy losses. The latest figure was a $3.7 billion loss during the third quarter.

Meta wants creators to make a living (and help solve its financial woes)

With Meta taking heavy losses on its metaverse division, CEO Mark Zuckerberg seems eager to attract more users to the creator economy via NFTs. 

According to Zuckerberg, the plan is to “help creators build for the metaverse,” and the roadmap includes blockchain-powered digital collectibles. To celebrate, Meta invited both Instagram and Facebook creators from around the world to “Creator Week” events during the first week of November in Los Angeles, London, Bali and Sao Paulo.

Echoing Web3’s promise to tear down walled gardens, Instagram’s new feature allows users to take any photos or video collectibles they create on Instagram off of the platform and share them to their preferred NFT wallets or marketplaces.

Meta recently launched its digital collectibles feature in 100 countries, enabling users to connect their digital wallets. But the feature only allows for Polygon, Ethereum and Flow NFTs. 

The latest update will add support for two new wallets — the Solana blockchain and Phantom wallet — in addition to existing options Rainbow, MetaMask, Trust Wallet, Coinbase Wallet and Dapper Wallet. 

Influencers and creators traditionally monetize their work via social media through a combination of brand partnerships, revenue sharing programs from various platforms, and even direct payments from fans and followers.

Meta’s Web3 strategy about helping creators make a living, Stephane Kasriel, head of commerce and fintech at Meta, stated in a Medium post. 

“Imagine if, as a creator, you use Instagram to sell a ticket (in the form of an NFT) to an event or experience that includes access to an exclusive meet and greet with you on video or unlocks access to other content,” Kasriel said. “Where there was once a single way to monetize that ticket, there could soon be multiple ways.”


Get the news in your inbox. Explore Blockworks newsletters:

Tags

Decoding crypto and the markets. Daily, with Byron Gilliam.

Upcoming Events

Old Billingsgate

Mon - Wed, October 13 - 15, 2025

Blockworks’ Digital Asset Summit (DAS) will feature conversations between the builders, allocators, and legislators who will shape the trajectory of the digital asset ecosystem in the US and abroad.

recent research

Unlocked by Template (10).png

Research

Innovations on Aptos’ technical design through Raptr, Shardines, and Zaptos approach near-optimal latency and throughput by unlocking 100% utilization of network resources, with the capacity to settle 260k transactions per second with latencies less than 800ms. The original Move language was revamped with the launch of Move 2, supporting more expressivity in smart contract logic and a scalable ability to interact with high volume datasets. The ecosystem has benefitted from strong asset inflows, now hosting over $1.3B in stablecoins, $450M in bridged BTC, and $530M in RWAs. Activity in the Aptos ecosystem has grown notably over the past year, with monthly application revenue reaching ~$835k and monthly DEX volumes growing to over $5B, both at new all time highs.

article-image

Asset allocator says fee compression could be a challenge as Grayscale converts more crypto funds to ETFs

article-image

The Stripe-acquired firm has big plans for a streamlined, multi-wallet future

article-image

Both founders of the former crypto lender have now landed in new crypto industry roles

article-image

Bitcoin’s recent peak is a victory lap for curvers left and right

article-image

Securitize CEO Carlos Domingo says institutions are eager to get exposure to tokenization