OpenSea changes its approach to enforcing creator fees after community backlash

OpenSea shifted its stance on enforcing creator royalties after recent backlash from digital art creators and the NFT collectors community. According to a Twitter thread posted by the marketplace, it will continue to enforce creator fees on all existing collections.

UPDATE: We will continue to enforce creator fees on all existing collections.
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— OpenSea (@opensea) November 9, 2022

Nevertheless, OpenSea shared a conclusion made by it that states that in the current economic downturn NFT holders looking to sale their assets are naturally looking to gain as much funds as they can from their trades. Apparently, for this reason traders are moving to marketplaces that don’t enforce creator royalties. OpenSea shared a graph according to which the trend of not paying creator fees has been growing weekly in the last month, and currently only 56% of all NFT trades include creator royalties, whereas at the same time last month this indicator stood at nearly 80%.

OpenSea states that despite being one of the biggest NFT marketplaces, no matter what policy it implements the trend to collectors paying less and less creator fees will only keep growing. Therefore, the company recommends NFT collections to work on developing more incentives to their communities which would stimulate traders to pay royalties. The popular marketplace also advises new collections to adopt on-chain enforcement tools, advertising its recently released registry as one such tool, and reminds existing collections that they can refuse to link to fee-avoiding marketplaces from their websites.

According to OpenSea, the NFT field is currently “at a collective inflection point” which requires believers in creator fees to get together on ensuring the durability of the practice. For this reason, OpenSea stated it will start open sourcing its data on creator fees in the upcoming weeks. The platform will also share more creator-focused technology updates, and its co-founder and CEO, along with the company’s VP of Operations, Marketplace and Integrity will be taking part in podcasts discussing in details “the future of creator fees on OpenSea”.

Many collectors shared their endorsement of OpenSea’s latest stance on creator fees enforcement, however the BAYC founders, which as reported by DeFi Teller released a blogpost recently stating their dissatisfaction with OpenSea’s previous plans of no longer enforcing creator fees for legacy NFT collections, are yet to comment on the matter.