OpenSea, the largest NFT marketplace in the world, made consequential changes to the royalty structure that it applied to content creators. However, the community did not allow that to happen unnoticed as they are increasing their pressure for OpenSea to change this decision. The information was released by OpenSea a few days ago and it will be applied for a “limited time.”
OpenSea Cuts Fees and Creator Royalties
OpenSea, the largest NFT marketplace in the blockchain industry surprisingly announced that it cut the 2.5% transaction fee on its platform for a limited period of time. This has a clear negative impact on content creators that heavily depend on these fees in order to generate income. Royalties were one of the most important tools they had in order to be incentivized to create better content and NFTs.
The main goal behind this decision is to favour and give priority to NFT collectors rather than content creators. According to OpenSea, this decision comes as they have noticed a massive shift in the NFT ecosystem with a move towards marketplaces that do not enforce creator earnings.
About it, the company said:
“We’ve worked to defend creator earnings on ALL collections when others didn’t. And when we introduced the Operator Filter, it was our belief that on-chain enforcement was the best way for creators to secure their revenue stream from the ongoing resale of their work.”
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
Furthermore, they mentioned that they thought that this solution could have catalyzed widespread enforcement of creator earnings. However, this didn’t happen. It is also worth taking into consideration that Blur, another large NFT marketplace, pushed users to block OpenSea. A large part of the community supported this saying that OpenSea was exploiting artists and content creators.
The Reaction of the Community
While OpenSea has faced criticism for its recent changes, some members of the community view them as a necessary evolution. Some analysts believe that a fee of 0.25% is inevitable for the NFT market, similar to the fully-scaled fungible token market that has had a decade to mature.
This is a great moment to understand what could happen with the non-fungible token market. Many things can take place and there are multiple factors that could affect the trends. Despite the cryptocurrency market recovering from the lowest price point in years, there are still several companies that are facing issues. It is clear that the NFT community has also been impacted by the bear market that started back in late 2021.
Another thing that is worth taking into account is related to Blyr overtaking OpenSea as the most used platform to handle and trade NFTs. This comes after the announcement and at a moment in which content creators are trying to better understand how to handle the current situation that the market is experiencing.
According to dApp Radar, Blur has surpassed OpenSea in terms of volume, handling over $100 million compared to $20 million from OpenSea or $1.22 million from X2Y2. It will be very interesting to see what could happen to the NFT market in the coming months and years and whether Blur will be able to keep its position as the largest NFT marketplace.
OpenSea published on Twitter that they will be communicating to the community about possible ways to reward the most royal users. Nevertheless, a clear answer might take some time before it is given to the community. One thing is clear, Blur was able to capitalize on the current market situation and take the lead. The question that we now have is for how long they will be able to keep in this favourable position.