OpenSea Announces Shift to Optional Royalties, Industry Reacts
- Yuga Labs said that it will end ties with NFT marketplace OpenSea if it goes ahead with a royalty-optional model.
- The marketplace announced that it would disable its royalty enforcement tool, the OpenSea Operator Filter.
- Creator fees for new NFT collections will become optional starting August 31.
- Mark Cuban said that the decision is a huge mistake and “kills future applications that go far beyond collectibles.”
Leading non-fungible token (NFT) marketplace, OpenSea, recently announced that it will be shifting to an optional royalty model, which means that rewarding creators will not be a must. This announcement brought significant heat from the players in the crypto space, including Yuga Labs, the firm behind NFT collections like Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC), and billionaire investor Mark Cuban.
Yuga Labs announced that it will end ties with OpenSea if it moves ahead with the royalty-optional model. The NFT marketplace confirmed that it will shut down the OpenSea Operator Filter and “move an optional creator fee on all secondary sales for all collections by February 2024.”
Interestingly, Yuga Labs confirmed that it “will begin the process of sunsetting support for OpenSea’s SeaPort for all upgradable contracts and any new collections, with the aim of this being complete in February 2024 in tandem with OpenSea’s approach.”
“For as much as NFTs have been about users truly owning their digital assets, they’ve also been about empowering creators,” he added. “Yuga believes in protecting creator royalties so creators are properly compensated for their work.”
On the other hand, Mark Cuban stated that this move is a huge mistake on the NFT marketplace’s part. He believes that the decision “diminished trust in the platform and hurt the industry. And I say this as an OpenSea investor.”
In response to a person supporting the NFT marketplace’s decision, Cuban wrote that “the buyer knows what the royalties are before they buy it. The creator can set the royalty to zero. They are part of the smart contract that mints the NFT. It’s not smart. It’s desperation.”
“The optional royalty approach kills future applications that go far beyond collectibles,” Cuban added. “Which is where the most money will be.”
It is also important to note that OpenSea announced the end of support for Binance’s BNB Smart Chain, or BSC, due to the “need to align resources with the most promising efforts,” deciding that “to continue supporting BSC outweighs the impact.”
As reported earlier by BitcoinWisdom, the NFT marketplace recently debuted OpenSea Pro, a new advanced and efficient NFT marketplace aggregator. The platform is capable of providing “the best deals and insights across 170 marketplaces and accessing sophisticated tools that meet their need for automation,” said the marketplace at the time of the announcement.
A crypto journalist with over 3 years of experience in DeFi, NFT, metaverse, etc. Parth has worked with major media outlets in the crypto and finance world and has gained experience and expertise in crypto culture after surviving bear and bull markets over the years.
