The popular marketplace OpenSea has chosen to temporarily remove its 2.5% fee on the sale of NFT. It also raises the issue of “creative revenue” payments, which are not always fully implemented by its competitors
OpenSea temporarily drops its 2.5% fee
The well-known marketplace OpenSea has chosen to temporarily remove the 2.5% fee applied to the sale of non-fungible tokens (NFT). This manoeuvre is necessary in order to fight against the platform’s growing number of competitors such as Blur, which has just airdropped its token:
We’re making some big changes today:
1) OpenSea fee → 0% for a limited time
2) Moving to optional creator earnings (0.5% min) for all collections without on-chain enforcement (old & new)
3) Marketplaces with the same policies will not be blocked by the operator filter– OpenSea (@opensea) February 17, 2023
When selling an NFT using OpenSea, if the collection does not use an on-chain application method, the minimum creator revenue will be 0.5%. Sellers also have the option to add additional creator revenue to any transaction. “
In fact, in order to automatically receive their royalties when reselling NFTs on the secondary market, a creator must set this directly in their collection settings. Platforms like OpenSea allow this:
Setting up creator fees on OpenSea
However, while such solutions allow OpenSea to automatically pay royalties to creators, the market has seen the emergence of platforms that do not always take this fully into account.
Creators at risk
Beyond the marketing aspect of this approach, OpenSea detects a change in trend with the new NFT marketplaces that are arriving on the market: a no-fee environment. The problem is that this dynamic leads to platforms not being able to fully pay out the royalties due to the creators, as there are no fees to pay out.
OpenSea estimates that 80% of NFT volume is affected by this issue, at least in part:
6/ Today, ~80% of total ecosystem volume does not pay full creator earnings, and the majority of volume (even accounting for inorganic activity) has moved to a zero-fee environment.
Source: https://t.co/8tLN035cGp
This requires a change.
– OpenSea (@opensea) February 17, 2023
While NFTs are supposed to allow for the automation of the payment of sums due to content creators, this “zero fees” policy initiated by the new platforms may raise questions. Although reducing their own fees is one of the levers to attract more people, doing so at the expense of artists can be seen as contrary to the Web3 philosophy.
From this point of view, it will be interesting to follow the future developments of the NFT ecosystem, in order to answer these questions.
