As the Blur vs OpenSea marketplace war continues, OpenSea has updated its stance on creator royalties. To clarify, the NFT marketplace has gone back on its word to enforce digital creator fees, reducing them to a 0.5% minimum, and allowing users to optionally pay creator royalties.
NFT Twitter has had mixed reactions to the issue, with most users stating that this is the wrong direction to move. Although, the platform terms this “the start of a new era” in the NFT industry. But is it really? Let’s dig deeper.
What’s Happening With OpenSea and Creator Royalties?
Leading NFT marketplace OpenSea has been trying to ensure that creators earn a fair share of the profits when their NFTs are sold. However, they’ve been having a hard time doing that because many other NFT marketplaces don’t enforce creator earnings. To try to solve this problem, OpenSea created something called the Operator Filter. This filter encourages other marketplaces to enforce creator earnings. Unfortunately, this didn’t work as well as they hoped, and now they’re making some changes.
For a limited (promotional) time, OpenSea is going to charge zero fees on transactions. They’re also changing the way they handle creator earnings. Instead of enforcing creator earnings for all collections, they’re making it optional for collections that don’t have on-chain enforcement. This means that creators can choose to set their fees for each sale, and buyers have to pay a minimum fee of 0.5%.
OpenSea is also changing the way they filter out marketplaces that don’t enforce creator earnings. In the past, they would block any marketplace that didn’t meet their standards. But now, they’ll only block marketplaces that don’t have the same policies as OpenSea. This means that more collections across marketplaces will be able to list NFTs on OpenSea, even if they don’t fully enforce creator earnings.
About 80% of the total ecosystem volume does not pay full creator earnings, and the majority of volume has moved to a zero-fee environment. OpenSea hopes these changes will keep its platform competitive and provide creators with a more resilient solution.
NFT Twitter Reacts
It seems that, with all the fuss about creator royalties and earnings, the NFT artists/creators always lose. As @NFTGod put it “Everyone wins except for the creator.” The move is essentially a strategic pull to drive ahead of OpenSea’s major competitor – the Blur NFT marketplace. With this ongoing “NFT Marketplace War”, OpenSea removes its previous 10% royalty fee to a mere 0.5%.
Moreover, reducing creator royalties may not be a good thing for the NFT ecosystem overall. OpenSea also stated in late 2022 that royalties would be respected for contracts deployed before Jan 2, 2023. A lot of creators built projects on the platform owing to this but now are confused about answers regarding the latest announcement.
According to many creators, even if marketplaces go down, an NFT ecosystem still exists owing to its digital creators. But on the other hand, if creators gain nothing from web3 infrastructures, they retreat from the market.
And without its creators, an NFT market ceases to exist. Blur on the other hand incentivized its entire community with “magic internet money” $BLUR airdrops. The recent news has flooded NFT Twitter, with collectors and members demanding the rumored OpenSea airdrop and an official token soon.
No further updates are announced as of the time of writing. NFTEvening follows the story closely as it develops. Meanwhile, enjoy these hilarious responses to the latest NFT drama:
Your ass got blurred pic.twitter.com/sB4dfsgFk3
— Gabriel Haines | machetes.eth (@gabrielhaines) February 17, 2023
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This article is educational material.
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