Magic Eden, Solana’s largest NFT marketplace will allow its users to decide what percentage to pay creators in royalties when they buy things on the website.
This was announced by the company:
🧵After some difficult reflection and discussions with many creators, we’ve decided to move to optional royalties on @MagicEden.
Effective later today, we will also begin running a promotion to waive our platform fees.
— Magic Eden 🪄 (@MagicEden) October 15, 2022
Buyers can set the royalty in three ways. User profiles can be edited to choose a payment percentage for all NFTs in the marketplace. Another way is to choose a percentage for an item or collection.
Magic Eden will also waive transaction fees on NFT purchases. The Solana NFT platform used to charge 2% on sales.
“We hope this decision is not permanent,” Magic Eden said in the announcement.
“It’s also very sad, it’s also very tragic. We didn’t want to be in this position, but the market has already spoken regarding optional market rights,” said a Magic Eden representative. “It was effectively a race to the bottom.”
The company also said it is committing $1 million to a fund to create better rights enforcement tools, and expects to experiment with “new models outside of rights” in the future.
A Magic Eden representative said its hand was forced by the 60% of NFT operators currently on royalty-enabled platforms.
Magic Eden raised $130 million at a valuation of $1.3 billion in June.
The announcement has come at a time when there is already a debate about NFT rights. Some users believe that mandatory royalty payments for non-fungible tokens should not be there, while creators argue that through these payments, they get a reward for their effort and work.
Creators rely on marketplaces like Magic Eden to get a certain percentage of the total value that the item gets while being sold in secondary sales.
SudoSwap, an NFT exchanger, has gained popularity for becoming a royalty-free platform.
X2Y2, a marketplace that sparked a vampire attack on the larger OpenSea marketplace, announced in August the removal of royalties for certain collections.
Last week, Solana’s well-known NFT collection DeGods removed all royalty payments, which seemed like a major move as the project’s founder had previously said that removing royalties would make NFTs even more expensive and lead to an increase in scam projects.
However, now the same founder has said that 0% royalties will soon be a standard for NFT marketplace platforms.
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