NFT creators are losing. Here's what can protect them.
Notably, royalties are fully respected on native listings made on community marketplaces and/or Rarible.com. To find out how to create and manage your own marketplace, making it the default go-to place for your community, please refer to this guide.
To reiterate, our stance has not changed: we believe that creators should receive full royalties from their work. We are closely watching the situation.
If you’ve been on Crypto Twitter recently, you’ve likely heard about the raging ‘marketplace war’: After OpenSea reigned supreme for years, Blur has now challenged it for market share, managing to capture most of trading volume over the past few weeks.
As part of its aggressive strategy, Blur essentially asked NFT creators to block their projects from trading on OpenSea if they wanted to have exposure on the hot new platform with lots of liquidity. To fight back, OpenSea has drastically changed its public stance on creator fees, announcing optional royalties. It also dropped its marketplace fees to 0% for a "limited time", only to silently roll it back to 0.5% on some collections just a couple of days later.
Almost entirely stripped of royalties—their once #1 source of revenue— NFT creators are now basically asked to choose the lesser evil.
And regardless of who ultimately wins the marketplace war (it may even be a third platform), they will likely normalize optional royalties. And while the general consensus on Crypto Twitter is that royalties should be paid, data shows that most people choose not to do that when given the opportunity and anonimity.
We cannot stress enough how bad it will be for the space.
Royalties were one of Web3’s biggest promises to creators, granting them a foolproof way to earn from both secondary and primary sales. If it wasn't for royalties, we wouldn't have nearly as many amazing projects and passionate people in the space.
Would we have Yuga Labs with their revolutionary approach to community building? Would we have LIRONA with her amazing art? Would we have renowned IRL artists like Takashi Murakami and Damien Hirst come into Web3, contributing to the ecosystem's growth with their experience? Maybe. But we doubt that.
Luckily, there is a tested way to help NFT creators: Community Marketplaces.
Here's why they are now more important than ever, helping creators to have both liquidity and their royalties respected, among other benefits.
How community marketplaces can help
The first ever NFT marketplace was LarvaLabs’ CryptoPunks marketplace. Launched in 2017, it became a home for the Punks community, enabling them to trade with each other. As a result, even several NFT hype waves later, CryptoPunks are mostly traded on their own marketplace. They don't rely on OpenSea and Blur, so the current marketplace war barely affects them.
We’ve been working on community marketplaces since early 2022. Since then, we’ve built dozens of marketplaces for Web3-native brands like PixelVault, rektguy, V1Punks and first-timers like FOX and McFarlane Toys. We've also rolled out the community marketplace builder that enables any NFT project owner on Ethereum or Polygon to create an NFT marketplace for free and with zero code knowledge (over 2000 community marketplaces so far has been recorded that way).
Building your community marketplace with Rarible gets you the following advantages:
Built-in liquidity
Perhaps the most important thing for any NFT marketplace is liquidity. That’s why every community marketplace automatically aggregates listings from OpenSea, X2Y2, Sudoswap and LooksRare, with more marketplaces to be added in the future.
Your marketplace comes with built-in liquditiy.
Enforced Royalties
Every community marketplace enforces full royalties for creators on all listings, including the ones aggregated from marketplaces that offer optional royalties, meaning you get a reliable income stream for your project.
You deserve your community’s support.
Custom Fees
While we can’t control other marketplaces’ fees, native listings on community marketplaces never cost any Rarible fees. That makes it a cheaper option for your community and incentivizes them to trade on their own marketplace, not on a general one.
If you want to set custom marketplace fees to benefit your own treasury, you can always set it anywhere you want (Rarible doesn’t take a cut).
Your marketplace, your rules.
Custom Design
On third-party marketplaces, every collection looks and feels the same in terms of UI. But NFT collections and communities are unique—especially because so many of them are about art, identity and expression!
When you set up your own community marketplace, you can customize many things like colors, featured items and your domain, among others.
Custom marketplace, custom experience.
Flagged Stolen Items
We all know that there are (unfortunately) a ton of scammers walking around the Web3 world, so it's important to protect your community from stolen NFTs.
Which is why community marketplaces automatically mark items that are reported as stolen from their owner on OpenSea.
Create your community marketplace today
Web3 enthusiasts talk about decentralization a lot. But what’s more centralized than an entire industry relying on one or two marketplaces?
Community marketplaces, in turn, allow projects to stay autonomous in this space.
And with enforced royalties, custom fees and all the other benefits, we believe they’re the most web3-native way to deploy your project.
So if you have your own collection on Ethereum or Polygon, create your own community marketplace today! It is free, easy and requires no code knowledge.