The largest Solana NFT marketplace, Magic Eden, announced that the platform would move to optional-royalties. The platform revealed it was a difficult reflection and that it discussed the development with many creators. Following the development, Magic Eden said it would run a promotion to waive platform fees.
There has been a rise in no-royalties on NFTs and debate around it has been building up. The growing trend with no or optional royalties on NFTs has notable marketplaces like Sudoswap, X2Y2, and now Magic Eden on this route. Sudoswap went on a no-royalty route and was followed shortly by X2Y2 but on an optional-royalty scheme.
Jack Lu, Co-founder/COO at Magic Eden, said in a Town Hall Twitter space held by the firm minutes after the announcement that Magic Eden is adapting to the trend because of its vision and need to survive in the industry. “There has been an exponential rise in optional royalty marketplaces and we also want to have a chance to build our vision and dream for what web3 NFT could be. We are creating monetization as a part of that and still want to survive in the industry as well, so that’s why we are adapting to this new trend,” he said.
Magic Eden understands the implications of the decision to the ecosystem and added that they had to finalize the move because today, royalties are not enforceable on-chain. “Unfortunately, royalties are not enforceable on a protocol level, so we have had to adapt to shifting market dynamics,” MagicEden said.
On the Town Hall space, a developer at Solana with the Twitter user @baalazamon emphasized that royalties are not enforceable on-chain and said, “It is possible to implement that, but it’s not easy from the engineering perspective.”
How will optional-royalties work?
Highlights from Magic Eden on Buyers’ and Sellers’ experience with the new feature:
- The decision on how much royalties to pay will be passed to the buyer.
- Buyers will choose to set their royalties in multiple ways. The settings will be saved and applied to NFT purchases, including Quick Buy + Pro Trade.
- Buyers can also choose how they would prefer to honour the royalties of each NFT on the “Item Details” page.
- Buyers will have the option of changing the collection-wide royalty on each of the collection’s listings.
- Sellers will get the exact price point they list their NFTs.
Magic Eden proposed to review its marketplace fee structure. “For the foreseeable future, Magic Eden will not be making any % of any sales,”. In addition, Magic Eden said it would launch a $1M prize pool Creator Monetization Hackathon to develop pro-royalty & alternative creator monetization tools.
Individuals working on pro-royalty tools or alternative business models are urged by the platform to reach out via Twitter DMs or help.magiceden.io.
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