Magic Eden Flip-Flops on Solana NFT Royalties, Making Them Optional

Magic Eden, the most popular marketplace Solana NFTs, Announced late Friday No longer strictly honoring creator-set royalties NFTs Sold through its platform, bowing to recent pressure from royalty-hating rivals quickly took market share.

“After some difficult reflection and discussion with many of our creators, we have decided to move to optional loyalty,” the platform tweeted. He said he would waive the fee.

Magic Eden has been Solana’s most dominant NFT marketplace for the past year, with over 90% market share at all times.The startup picked up momentum Valued at $1.6 billion in Junehas raised $130 million in Series B funding just nine months after its platform launch.

However, emerging marketplaces such as Hadeswap and Solanart, whose sellers have opted not to require creators to pay royalties on secondary sales, have begun to eat into Magic Eden’s dominance in recent weeks, prompting action from the platform. urged.

Last week, Magic Eden Partnership with Coral Cubeanother marketplace and aggregator, enabling Solana NFT transactions with optional royalties while maintaining full creator royalties in Magic Eden’s own marketplace.

Thursday, Tiffany Huang — Head of Marketing and Content at Magic Eden —Said Decryption The partnership with Coral Cube was designed to “protect the Magic Eden brand while serving traders,” and the marketplace “always prides itself on being deeply creator-centric.”

But on Friday night, Magic Eden tweeted that it had changed its mind, and will follow a growing trend of Solana marketplaces allowing users to decline royalty payments to NFT project artists and creators.

“This is not a decision we take lightly. We understand that this move has serious implications for the ecosystem,” said Magic Eden. murmured“We also hope that it is not a permanent decision. Loyalty is not enforceable on-chain today. We welcome and expect new standards to protect loyalty.”

To support its famous desire, Magic Eden has announced a hackathon initiative. Web3 Builders will develop NFT technologies and standards that will allow creator set loyalty to be fully enforced on-chain. Magic Eden will award prizes up to $1,000,000. Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko Hackathon judge.

Typically, in NFT marketplace transactions, the seller pays a set royalty fee to the project creator. However, Magic Eden takes a different approach, putting the onus on the buyer to choose whether or not to pay royalties on each transaction. By making it possible not to pay royalties, it will be treated like a tip to the creator.

market movements

There has been an increasing trend to skip NFT royalties in recent months, and Solana has been the focus of late. Decryption Searching for changing tides .

As of Thursday afternoon, the zero-royalty and loyalty-option marketplaces have slashed Magic Eden’s recent market share. This was 58% in the last 24 hours and 61% in the previous week, based on total Solana NFT trading volume.

It looks like traders are already back on the platform following Friday’s announcement. According to data compiled by NFT Marketplace TiesoMagic Eden accounted for 86% of Solana NFT volume over the last 24 hours as of this writing.

Magic Eden’s decision to temporarily reduce marketplace fees, in addition to making royalties optional, had unintended consequences. wash tradingwhere users exchange NFTs between managed wallets at artificially inflated prices far beyond what the market dictates.

it has allegedly done Project creators and backers may attempt to increase the tracked transaction volume of their respective projects, raising them in sales rankings and gaining more visibility in the process. As a place, OpenSea still respects creator royalties. said on saturday Temporarily suspending the inclusion of the Solana NFT project in market-wide leaderboards due to apparent manipulation.

Reactions to Magic Eden’s announcement have been mixed, with Divisive trends in royalties controversy In the weeks and months leading up to that decision. Many Solana NFT traders ridiculed Magic Eden on Twitter for the sudden turn after backlashing against royalty-evading rivals earlier.

Some creators acknowledged that the market was heading in this direction and that unenforceable NFT royalties could not be a sustainable revenue stream for Web3 creators, but this news and business Some creators were upset by the potential repercussions.

Two other Solana NFT marketplaces said they would maintain creator loyalty despite the trend. Game-centric marketplace Fractal and the artwork marketplace Exchange Art. The latter also says it is expanding its use of an optional “Exchange Royalties Guarantee” tool that allows creators to prevent their tokenized artwork from being sold on other marketplaces. Stated.

“With astonishing speed, the platform has decided to treat artists as SKUs instead of people.” exchange art tweet“Royalty has a reason. Creators don’t have to worry about being listed on sites that deny their rights. This is unacceptable.” [we’re] I’m not going to just condone it.

Prominent creators from across the NFT space were also in attendance. dead fellers collaborator betty tweeted The Magic Eden move would “take the power out of self-starting for smaller creators without the huge advantages that well-funded and well-connected people already have.” Jimmy “j1mmy” McNelis explained it As a “bad move” Among other colorful comments across an array of tweets.

Artist Mike “Beeple” Winkelman is more extroverted, Tweet He was “obviously a royalist, [doesn’t] I love what Magic Eden and other companies are doing.

“By switching to Buyers Premium,” writes Beeple. very Since they are on the project, they have an incentive to pay for this and the creators can see if this has been paid. ”