We Won’t Get NFT Royalties Back by Asking Nicely. We Need the Nuclear Option…

TL;DR

• Want NFT creator royalties back? We need to be using sticks, not carrots.

• OMA3’s ‘standards’ approach won’t bring royalties back. At least, it won’t if these standards rely on the honor system to be enforced. We’ve seen that attempted. It doesn’t work.

• Our proposed solution: Create a platform that tracks an NFT collection and updates individual NFTs if/when they’re listed for sale on marketplaces that don’t enforce royalties, so that the utility is bricked and the image is blacked out.

Full Story

Want NFT creator royalties back? We need to be using sticks, not carrots.

OMA3 (aka the Open Metaverse Alliance for Web3) is a group made up of some of the heaviest hitters in the Web3 industry, think:

Yuga Labs (the Bored Ape creators), Magic Eden (the NFT marketplace), and Animoca Brands (the Web3 gaming giant).

Anyways, OMA3 is on a mission to standardize creator royalties on NFT marketplaces, which is super important!

Ensuring that both holders and creators are able to derive monetary value from an NFT series over time, will elevate the overall health of the space in the long term.

…only problem is, OMA3’s ‘standards’ approach won’t bring royalties back.

At least, it won’t if these standards rely on the honor system to be enforced. We’ve seen that attempted. It doesn’t work.

So we thought we’d publicly submit an unsolicited idea to OMA3:

Tweak the tech behind the ‘Aspen’ platform (made by Monax Labs), which tracks and bricks an NFT’s utility if royalties aren’t honored on a sale.

We’ve mentioned a version of this in the past, and it goes something like this…

Create a platform that tracks an NFT collection and updates individual NFTs if/when they’re listed for sale on marketplaces that don’t enforce royalties, so that the utility is bricked and the image is blacked out.

The only way to fix it? Delist it from the marketplace.

The only way to avoid it in the future? List the NFT on a marketplace that honors royalties.

This will make the idea of ‘zero royalty marketplaces’ poisonous in the mind of buyers and sellers alike, destroying the advantage they once had, and cratering the ‘low/no royalty’ business model.

It’s an option with zero chill…but it’d work!