Starting Tuesday, November 8th, OpenSea will begin enforcing NFT royalties set by their creators.
There’s no official statement on the topic yet. The EOS platform is designed to be an open, transparent marketplace, so it should make sense that the community of artists, developers, and consumers would get a say in any new guidelines the team wants to follow.
The company will also release an on-chain royalty enforcement tool, described as a “simple code snippet,” aimed at helping creators prevent their work from being traded on secondary markets such as exchanges and gambling sites.
This is why the open-source project OpenSea is building an alternative blockchain ecosystem on which NFT creators will be paid for the content they share on the network.
It’s clear that many creators want the ability to enforce fees on-chain; and fundamentally, we believe that the choice should be theirs to make – it shouldn’t be a decision made for them by marketplaces,” Devin Finzer, Co-Founder and CEO of OpenSea, said in a blog post announcing the measure.
The company believes the token-based system will help incentivize the participation of more creators in OpenSea’s network.
A number of additional tools and improvements will be announced in the coming months to improve on-chain NFT royalty stipulations in the near future.
Magic Eden’s decision to opt out of supporting creators contrasts with competitor OpenSea, which earlier this month elected to support creators as part of its new creator program.
Ethereum platforms, X2Y2, LooksRare, and Blur all have implemented similar no-royalty models to help keep prices low.
Some people are saying that if you’re not already collecting licensing revenues, you should consider doing so to improve your royalty rates. But on the other hand, it’s not easy to enforce a licensing agreement with a creator.
The CEO stated that creators could only have fees with their existing non-upgradeable smart contracts if they changed the entire collection into a new smart contract.
“Creator fees are an important innovation of Web 3.0 that help creators monetize their work more effectively,” Finzer said.
