NFT
OpenSea, the leading non-fungible token (NFT) marketplace, announced today that it will temporarily eliminate its 2.5% fee on sales, as well as cut down on creator royalty protections, in an effort to acclimatize the rapidly changing crypto market. This move comes in response to increasing competition from upstart rival Blur.
OpenSea Brings New Changes
On Friday, OpenSea announced through Twitter that it will only enforce a 0.5% required creator royalty charge on NFT trades for projects that do not have an on-chain enforcement method. However, sellers have the option to pay a bigger proportion if they so want. A creator royalty is a percentage of the profit made from the sale of an NFT, often ranging from 5 to 10% of the total price. After the initial sale of tokens, this is how NFT collections are expected to continue to make revenue on an ongoing basis.
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
According to the tweet published by the marketplace, it will also let sales to take place on other platforms that adhere to the same regulations. This means that content producers won’t have to decide whether their earnings will come from OpenSea or Blur.
In its official announcement, the team was quoted as saying:
This is the start of a new era for OpenSea,” the marketplace tweeted. “We’re excited to test this model and find the right balance of incentives and motivations for all ecosystem participants.
OpenSea referred to on-chain statistics that demonstrated around 80% of the volume of current NFT trading is conducted without any form of creator royalty being included. The market gave the impression that it is attempting to work out a solution that will be to everyone’s advantage, including NFT developers and traders.
Blur’s Growing Dominance
The move by OpenSea comes after a successful week for Blur, a new entrant in the NFT space that began operations in October of last year. On Tuesday, Blur distributed its BLUR tokens to more than 100,000 NFT traders. And just the following day, the company recommended NFT project creators to prevent trades using OpenSea. There is no fee assessed to artists for using the Blur marketplace.
As things currently stand, the price of Blur (BLUR) is trading at $0.97 which represents an increase of 9.43% over the past 24 hours, in contrast to a massive drop of 82% over the last seven days, according to CoinMarketCap’s crypto market tracker.
