NFT royalties are dead as OpenSea, one of the biggest marketplaces for buying and reselling, has said it will no longer collect resale fees.
Starting March 2024, OpenSea says it will no longer enforce royalty fees, instead considering them tips going forward. That’s an optional percentage of a sale price that sellers can choose to give to the original artist. If a seller decides that percentage is 0% then that is their choice. It’s the last nail in the coffin of web3 as a sustainable marketplace to support artists.
Blur has overtaken OpenSea as the largest NFT marketplace by trading volume, only instituting a 0.5% fee on most collections. OpeanSea says it will stop enforcing a royalty fee on all new NFTs beginning August 31. Current royalty fees for established NFT collections will continue until March 2024. Past that point, all royalty fees will be considered optional tips on future sales.
OpenSea fully admits in the blog post supporting creators through royalty fees hasn’t been in the web3 community’s interest for a long time. “Since its introduction, we’ve seen several web3 marketplaces and aggregators (Blur, Dew, LooksRare) circumvent the Operator Filter to avoid enforcing creator fees on their platforms,” CEO Devin Finzer writes in the blog post making the announcement.
Finzer says despite royalty fees going away; there are still other ways for creators to monetize their work using web3 tech. “Our role in this ecosystem is to empower innovation beyond a single use case or business model,” Finzer continues in the post. That’s an interesting take, considering OpenSea was founded on the principle that creators could continually receive a cut of their work when it found a new buyer.
It’s also unclear how much future NFTs have in any applications beyond internet clout. Coachella attempted to sell 10 life-time NFT tickets to its shows that are now caught up in the FTX bankruptcy scandal.
