With the introduction of a new “on-chain” tool to assist producers in enforcing royalties, the non-fungible (NFT) marketplace OpenC appears to have entered the discussion around NFT royalties.
The NFT market, which, according to CoinGecko, controls 66% of the market, has remained largely mute on the subject of royalties and enforcement while others in the sector have been putting their plans into action over the past several months.
OpenSea CEO Devin Finzer wrote in a blog post on November 6 that in regions where payments are optional, “voluntary maker fee payment rates have dropped below 20%,” while maker fees in other markets “simply are not” paid at all.
According to the CEO of OpenSea, Bazaar has introduced a new mechanism that will enable creators to have “on-chain enforcement” of their royalties. The tool, according to Finzer, is a “simple code snippet” that permits developers to apply royalties to present and past NFT collection smart contracts as well as existing upgradeable smart contracts. The code will only permit creator-fee-only platforms to sell NFT, and none other.
Beginning on November 8 only new collections that make use of the on-chain enforcement tool will be subject to creator fee enforcement by OpenSea. The platform will also release new tools with comparable functions in the upcoming months and ask the community for input on the changes. OpenSea said it won’t make any changes to existing collections on the platform until December 8.
Overall, the platform is trying to take into account many angles on this subject, such as going through with enforcing off-chain fees for particular subsets of collections, allowing optional creator fees, or collaborating on additional on-chain enforcement methods for creators.
According to OpenSea CEO Devin Finzer, some existing collections’ smart contracts may already permit OpenSea’s upgrade, which will impose royalties on-chain, while other contracts may be more difficult to change.
Over the past few months, other NFT markets have begun introducing their own techniques to impose royalties. The Magic Eden NFT marketplace is one of them, and it recently included optional royalties. Additionally, it conducted a campaign to eliminate its 2% platform fees.
