Yuga Labs, the non-fungible token (NFT) heavyweight, announced on Monday afternoon that its collections with a royalty filter will only be available for trading on marketplaces that enforce royalty payments starting Tuesday.
“We will be sunsetting our support for marketplaces who don’t support royalties for ALL creators. This means that our collections with a royalty filter will only be traded on marketplaces that respect creator royalties for any and all creators at the protocol level,” wrote Yuga Labs on X.
Among those collections with a royalty filter are the Otherside Koda and Moonbirds Mythics collections, while Yuga’s most well-known and most-traded collections — CryptoPunks and Bored Ape Yacht Club — do not have such filters and thus are not included in the new policy, a Yuga Labs blog post stated.
Royalties refer to the fees buyers pay to the creators when they purchase an NFT on a secondary marketplace like OpenSea, Blur, or Magic Eden.
Yuga Labs’ announcement comes one day before NFT marketplace Magic Eden rolls out on the Ethereum blockchain. The move from Yuga Labs also comes as total royalties paid to NFT creators have substantially declined over the past three years, data from blockchain analytics firm Nansen shows.
Eighteen collections from Yuga Labs will only trade on royalty-enforcing marketplaces, per a blog post from the NFT juggernaut.
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Among the most popular NFT marketplaces, Blur set its minimum royalty rate at 0.5%, according to a tweet from December 2022, but OpenSea stopped enforcing royalty fees last August by allowing NFT sellers to avoid paying such fees to NFT creators for new collections.
“Royalties are the lifeline that keep creators building fun, weird, and innovative activations in the space,” Yuga Labs said in its announcement. Yuga Labs did not immediately respond to Unchained’s request for comment.
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