OpenSea, an NFT marketplace, responded to complaints from creators earlier this week by announcing it will keep imposing royalties across all collections moving forward.
On November 7, OpenSea made the announcement that they would be releasing an on-chain tool that would enable creators to impose royalties for any new releases on the platform, but they refrained from doing the same for existing collections.
The exchange stated at the time that it would be looking into options such as “allowing optional creator fees,” “enforcing off-chain fees for some subsets of collections,” and “collaborating with other on-chain enforcement options for creators.”
OpenSea’s decision receive criticism from the community
The announcement received a lot of criticism from the community, some of whom urged OpenSea to clarify its position because of its ambiguous messaging, and others who objected to the idea of an “optional creator fee.”
Bobby Kim, co-founder of The Hundreds, and other NFT creators announced on November 9 that they had decided not to release their upcoming NFT collection on OpenSea because they were “waiting to see if OpenSea would take a stand to preserve creator royalties for existing collections.”
In a blog post published on November 8, the founders of Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC), including Wylie Aronow, Greg Solano, and Kerem Atalay, weighed in on the discussion. They said that the decision to leave OpenSea was “not great” and revealed the company’s intention “to follow the crowd and remove creator royalties for legacy collections from their platform.”
The NFT platform seems to have taken note of the complaints and announced in a tweet on November 9 that it would also “continue to enforce creator fees on all existing collections.” We were looking for your feedback, and we heard it, loud and clear, according to the platform, which said they were “awed by the passion we’ve seen from creators and collectors alike this week.”
“In short, we’re at a collective inflection point: if everyone left in this ecosystem who believes that creator fees are important to our future links arms on this, we WILL ensure that fees are durable.”
