Magic Eden, the largest NFT marketplace on the Solana blockchain, announced it would give buyers the opportunity to determine how much royalties they want to pay to creators.
“This is not a decision we take lightly. We understand this move has serious implications for the ecosystem,” wrote Magic Eden on Twitter.
The topic of NFT royalties has been in the spotlight for the past few months, especially since the launch of Sudoswap, an NFT marketplace that charges zero royalties, as there’s no way to enforce royalties on chain.
Users have been moving to marketplaces that don’t make them pay royalties, and Magic Eden does not want to lose market share to its competitors. However, the hope is that the move is not “permanent,” welcoming innovation on new token standards to allow royalties to be enforced by code, not just honor or the will of the buyer.
The decision from the Magic Eden team caused a cascade of different opinions to invade crypto Twitter. It even gave rise to a spontaneous debate on The Chopping Block podcast between Haseeb Qureshi and Zhuoxun Yin (on the anti-royalty side) with Laura Shin and Li Jin (on the pro-royalty side).
Austin Federa, head of communications at Solana, wrote: “rugging royalties on projects in active development is a mistake.” Fxnction, an NFT Twitter influencer, said “it feels like a desperate move to appease down bad retail investors who are complaining on Twitter dot com.”
On the other side of the argument, Loopify tweeted that projects that rely on royalties as a major revenue source are unsustainable and at risk.
Additionally, Qureshi, host of The Chopping Block, had predicted on the show that all NFT marketplaces would follow the 0% royalties model. It looks like Magic Eden is proving him right!
