Yuga Labs and CryptoPunks are the two latest NFT brands to stand up and speak out against OpenSea’s highly controversial decision last week to (again) refrain from enforcing “mandatory” royalties for creators – by cutting all support for new Block NFT collections on OpenSea’s SeaPort by February 2024.
Yuga Labs, the parent company of both BAYC and CryptoPunks, announced via “X” (formerly Twitter) that it is committed to “fostering an ecosystem where… creators are rewarded for their work.”
“While NFTs were about users truly owning their digital assets, they were also about empowering creators. Yuga believes in protecting creator royalties so that creators are properly compensated for their work,” Yuga CEO Daniel Alegre said in his tweet.
Emily Kitts, a spokesperson for Yuga Labs, shared The edge that the company will work to “ban OpenSea’s marketplace from trading [its] collections as royalties are phased out,” but did not elaborate on which NFT collections would be affected.
The irony of NFTs and digital art
The biggest selling point of digital art, especially digital collectibles (NFTs), was that these artists were put at the center of these canvases and rewarded every time their artwork was resold in a secondary market.
For companies like Yuga, who first made a name for themselves after the debut of their flagship Bored Ape collection, royalty fees for those collectibles alone amounted to around $35 million – all through OpenSea as of November 2022.
Regarding OpenSea’s shocking announcement last week, the NFT marketplace clarified that creator royalty fees would not go away, instead simply ending “the ineffective unilateral enforcement of them.”
Naturally, this sent a nasty shock wave through the digital arts community and towards artists who have all expressed disbelief and anger as they began to take a stand against OpenSea’s lack of respect and appreciation for the creators from which it has continued to benefit over the years. years.
The irony here, of course, is that the promises of companies integrating Web3 infrastructures that wanted to improve productivity, accessibility and create new revenue streams for digital art creators didn’t really mean much as the revenue streams are essentially in the hands of NFT marketplaces like OpenSea.
And this doesn’t help the general sentiment towards Web3 and NFTs, especially in the current market downturn where the average person understandably has no reason to rely on these infrastructures or promises from major tech and Web3 native brands that want to enrich the lives of the masses.
What’s next for OpenSea now that the big IP address is gone?
While NFT marketplaces like OpenSea have the royalty map under their control, it’s certainly not sustainable, especially as intellectual property (IP) like Yuga’s BAYC and CryptoPunks are major contributors to and fuel their success. In other words, what would these marketplaces do without these IP franchises?
According to data collected from Ninjalerts, Yuga’s 30-day volume is about 80% the size of OpenSeas, at $52.8 million and $66.7 million, respectively.
Blur, which recently surpassed OpenSea as the leading NFT marketplace by trading volume, forces a 0.5 percent fee, which is unfortunately lower than the average 5 to 10 percent royalty fee paid to that NFT artist.
Starting August 31, OpenSea will implement its “optional” royalty mechanism for all new NFT collections, giving collectors the option of whether or not to show their appreciation for the artist whose work they are paying to buy.