Time To Ship
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Broken promises

Broken promises

OpenSea takes a big swing, AirBnB to show legit prices, Twitter asks laid off workers to return

Amol Avasare
November 08, 2022

If you gotta do layoffs, do them right. After firing half the company last week, Elon's realized that he actually needs some of those workers. Several folks who were let go are now being asked to come back. Unsurprisingly, it sounds like the only ones accepting the offer are those on visas...

Wait... They shipped what!?

OpenSea shipped a tool for enforcing NFT royalty payments.

Backstory: Royalties were billed as a key NFT value prop, whereby creators would receive ongoing streams of income when their NFTs were resold in the future.

As crypto winter set in, many exchanges made royalties optional to boost trading volumes. Today, ~80% of secondary market buyers don't pay NFT royalties to creators.

Details: The new royalty enforcement tool ships today. Highlights include:

Enforcement of royalty payments taking place on-chain
Creators able to ban sales on marketplaces that don't enforce royalties
For now, the tool applies to new NFTs only

OpenSea will soon make a decision on whether to apply the tool to existing NFTs.

Why it matters: Platforms like OpenSea are in a tight spot. Enforcing royalties risks irking traders as paying creators cuts into their margins. However, not enforcing royalties represents a major broken promise from the industry, and creators stand to lose big.

Separately, encouraging NFT creators to blacklist rival marketplaces is a big deal. Once billed as the open and decentralized world, the ecosystem now risks becoming a place where NFTs aren't even interoperable between marketplaces.

It's a big moment for crypto and NFTs.