OpenSea creators will no longer be able to blacklist NFT marketplaces that don’t enforce royalty payments
The popular NFT marketplace OpenSea has announced via its official Twitter account that the platform will turn off the royalty enforcement tool Operator Filter on Aug. 31.
The on-chain tool launched in November 2022 in response to the rising popularity of an optional royalty model, which means paying a royalty fee to the creator is at the discretion of the buyer. That led to the fall in royalty payment rate to less than 20%. Operator Filter aimed to allow creators to make sure they receive their royalty payments.
Not to dive into technical details, this “simple code snippet” enabled the enforcement of royalties on NFT smart contracts. The code could also restrict NFT sales to those marketplaces that enforce creator fees.
However, it appears that the tool didn’t have the planned efficiency. One of the factors contributing to Operator Filter’s low utility, according to OpenSea founder and CEO Devin Finzer, was that certain NFT marketplaces circumvented OpenSea’s blacklist by integrating the Seaport Protocol and still avoided creator fees.
In addition, the platform received some negative feedback from creators who believed the tool was limiting their own control over where their collections were sold, although creators were not obliged to use the solution. Finally, the approach relied on the acceptance by the entire NFT ecosystem, which didn’t happen.
Therefore, OpenSea decide to change the way it handles royalty fees. Namely, the platform will move to optional creator fees on all secondary sales for new collections and improve visibility of creator fee settings and listings on buyer & seller side.
Starting from Aug. 31, the Operator Filter will no longer block any marketplaces. At the same time, those collections that are already using the tool as well as existing collections on non-Ethereum blockchains will continue to get the creator’s preferred fees forced up to Feb. 29, 2024.
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