Yuga Labs — makers of the popular Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) NFT collection — has revealed its plans to cut ties with NFT marketplace OpenSea. This comes in response to the platform’s proposed move to an optional royalty system.
On Thursday, August 17, OpenSea announced that it is changing its creator fee framework, making royalties optional for new collections after August 31, 2023. The NFT marketplace also announced that it would be disabling the operator filter, a feature that enforces creator royalties.
According to the announcement, NFT collections that used the operator filter until August 31 will have creator royalties enforced until February 29, 2024, when the fees become optional.
In the blog post, OpenSea explained the rationale behind its decision by saying that the operator filter is designed to give creators more control. However, the market claims that it has not gained much-needed adoption in the web3 ecosystem.
Yuga Labs responds to OpenSea’s decision
On Friday, August 18, Yuga Labs published an open letter on X (formerly Twitter), which subtly criticized OpenSea’s decision to make maker fees optional on all secondary sales for all collections by February 2024. The maker of BAYC also announced plans to phase out support for OpenSea’s SeaPort, a marketplace protocol that facilitates the buying and selling of NFTs.
Daniel Alegre, CEO of Yuga Lab, said in response:
Yuga Labs will begin phasing out support for OpenSea’s SeaPort for all upgradeable contracts and new collections, with a goal of completion by February 2024, along with OpenSea’s approach.
Alegre noted that while the goal of NFTs was to revolutionize real digital asset ownership, it was also about empowering artists and creators. “Yuga believes in protecting creator royalties so that creators are properly compensated for their work,” he added.
Yuga Labs’ stance is likely to be a major blow to OpenSea, but perhaps not one the market hadn’t anticipated. In January, the makers of BAYC blacklisted about four marketplaces—with an optional royalty model—from their Sewer Pass collection.
OpenSea ends support for the BNB Smart Chain
OpenSea also recently announced its decision to turn off the minting and listing of NFTs on BNB’s smart chain. According to the place on Xthis move was motivated by the “market’s need to match resources to the most promising efforts”.
The NFT platform wrote in the announcement:
As of today (August 18, 2023) you will no longer be able to create new listings for or make new offers on BSC NFTs. However, you can still view, discover and transfer BSC NFTs on our site.
This latest development brings OpenSea’s total number of supported chains down to 10, including Arbitrum, Avalanche, Ethereum, Optimism, Polygon, Solana, and the recently added Base and Zora.
Crypto total market cap at $1.03 trillion | Source: daily TOTAL chart on TradingView
Featured image of NFT Culture, chart from TradingView