Bored Apes Oppose OpenSea’s NFT Royalty, Offers Technical Solution

Yuga Labs' founders defended NFT creator royalties and called out OpenSea's NFT Royalty plan

With top NFT marketplace OpenSea saying over the weekend that it may follow the trend of no longer enforcing creator royalties on secondary sales, more and more prominent artists and creators are making their views known. OpenSea's NFT Royalty Tool is unclear and potentially misleading, and that part of its plan is anti-competitive. As many NFT platforms shifted away from honoring NFT creator royalties in recent weeks, top marketplace OpenSea had remained silent on the subject, apparently weighing its options. On Saturday night, the $13.3 billion startup finally showed its hand—but OpenSea's NFT Royalty Tool isn't sitting well with many prominent Web3 creators. The Bored Apes founders want an NFT creator royalties model that ensures transferring NFTs between wallets remains free and encourages creators to remain within the NFT ecosystem.

OpenSea's NFT Royalty Tool is created to help with this—a code snippet you can add to new and upgradeable NFT contracts. The code restricts NFT sales to marketplaces that enforce creator fees. This is the first version of this tool, and it will provide information about additional solutions as they become available.

To set creator fees for sales using OpenSea, you'll need to add code to enforce your creator fees on-chain, or implement another method of blocking creator fee-evading marketplaces.

You can follow these instructions in GitHub to learn how to add the code to a new contract or an upgradeable contract. Please reach out to us at support.opensea.io if you run into any issues.

If you choose to use this tool on an upgradeable contract, once you've updated your contract to include on-chain creator fee enforcement, you'll need to submit a support ticket. The team will make sure these fees are reflected on OpenSea, and the company will email you when the change has been made.

In a blog post shared today by Wylie "Gordon Goner" Aronow—but also signed by his co-founders Greg "Garga" Solano and Kerem "Tomato" Atalay, along with 10KTF CTO Randy "Melonpan" Chung—Yuga decried the increasing industry moves away from honoring creator royalties, and proposed a technical solution for enforcing them.

Yuga Labs and 10KTF—a digital "tailor" that creates fashion for NFT avatars—have proposed an allow list model that will let creators only approve secondary trades through marketplaces that honor royalties. If a marketplace's smart contract is on the list, then a transaction will go through. If not, then it won't. Standard wallet-to-wallet transfers would be unaffected, they wrote.

"The NFT ecosystem would be a tiny fraction of what it is today if it weren't for creator royalties," the authors write, noting "a couple facts" at the start of the piece. "The leading marketplaces of the past couple years would be nowhere if they hadn't supported them."

The founders note that when the Bored Ape Yacht Club launched in 2021 at a price around $220 worth of Ethereum apiece, Yuga set a 2.5% creator royalty on secondary sales because that's the amount that OpenSea charged for its own marketplace fee. It's lower than the royalty fee chosen by many other NFT creators—typically between 5% and 10% of the sale price.

"The end result has been that OpenSea has made around $35 million dollars from Bored Ape sales on its platform, not including any of our other collections," they wrote. "We've never met the founders, but perhaps they have a beach house somewhere with a plaque for us."