NFT Marketplace Wars See Royalties Evaporate and Creators Aren’t Happy

A war for dominance between different NFT marketplaces has caused royalties paid to creators to evaporate. As a result, NFT creators are turning to platforms that continue to enforce the payout of royalties, with Coinbase NFT being one of them.

The war between NFT marketplaces has also been fueled by the new marketplace Blur, which made its entry as the largest marketplace by trading volume in a space that used to be dominated by OpenSea.

Blur’s rise to the top of the ranking has likely been helped by lower royalty payouts from other platforms, with some creators going as far as to block certain marketplaces from dealing with their collections altogether.

So far, the blocking feature that has been programmed into some NFTs has hurt OpenSea in particular, given how angry some creators are about how the platform has stopped to enforce creator royalties.

Deathbats Club adds “fail safes”

Writing on Twitter earlier this month, American singer and creator of the Deathbats NFT collection, Matthew Sanders aka. M. Shadows, said that the halt in payouts from NFT marketplaces is something they have discussed in his team.

He made it clear that until the practice changes, certain “fail safes” that blocks these platforms will be coded into his NFTs. He also said that Coinbase NFT from now on is his “preferred marketplace to buy and sell Deathbats Club.”

“18 months ago, when we started the [Deathbats Club], we had a discussion about how marketplaces collected royalties and understood the fact that someday they could simply not comply,” he wrote, while adding:

“In response, we built some fail safes that could simply block these platforms from accessing our collection.”

The NFT creator followed up by saying that everything they do as a club for their members costs money, and that taking on those costs by constantly minting new NFTs would be “pointless and dumb.”

“We hope @opensea has a good time appeasing the penny stock trade…..er ‘NFT community’,” he added, while pointing out that this comes at the expense of creators.

M. Shadows added a day later that his team is “willing to play ball” with OpenSea if they accommodate creators, but made it clear that any solution without creator royalties is unacceptable.

So far, OpenSea has not changed its stance on the creator royalty issue, and the war for NFT creators and traders will in all likelihood continue, with newer platforms like Blur or Coinbase NFT possibly taking the top spots.