Yesterday, the NFT’s Blur marketplace finally allowed users to redeem care packages for $BLUR, the platform’s native token. The event was highly anticipated and resulted in a significant rise in the market over the past month. Ultimately, the optional royalties market secured more than $430 million in trading volume in the last 30 days. And yesterday, the money kept flowing.
The event saw several important merchants raise over $1 million token value. According to data from radardappBlur’s 24-hour trading volume was around $9.5 million, which puts it second only to OpenSea, whose trading volume was about $12 million.
Now, it looks like Blur is going head-to-head with OpenSea in a new chapter of the Web3 royalty war.
In a blog post published this afternoon (February 15), the Blur team told users that they should block the OpenSea NFT marketplace. Because? Because creators currently can’t get full royalties on both Blur and OpenSea. Instead, they must choose one to get full royalties: OpenSea or Blur, but not both.
This happens because OpenSea automatically sets royalties as optional when it detects transactions in Blur. According to OpenSeathey have this policy to protect both the creators and their own results.
Blur vs OpenSea explained
In a series of tweets posted in November 2022, the OpenSea company outlined its rationale for banning optional royalty-free marketplaces like Blur.
“In the economic downturn, many of those looking to sell their NFTs are trying to sell them for as much as they can. Moving your listings to marketplaces that do not charge fees is one way to do this. For collectors, this means that the NFTs they really want are increasingly likely to be listed on marketplaces that don’t charge creation fees. Even if these collectors say they want to pay creator fees, they are becoming more and more likely to buy in those marketplaces… Unless something changes soon, this space tends to pay significantly less creator fees.” — Open sea
OpenSea’s response to this problem is to encourage people to avoid having their NFTs traded on royalty-optional platforms. How do they do that?
For the full creator fees to apply on the OpenSea platform, people who created smart contracts after January 2, 2023 must take on-chain steps to make the royalties enforceable. In other words, OpenSea requires creators to use on-chain tools that prevent the sale of NFTs in marketplaces that do not impose royalties on creators. Blur is a royalty-optional platform. As a result, users must block the sale of their NFTs on Blur in order to get full royalties on OpenSea. If an individual chooses No to do this, OpenSea automatically sets royalties as “optional” in these collections.
In short, optional royalty platforms like Blur should be blocked or OpenSea makes royalties optional.
Blur disagrees with this stance, saying that creators should be the ones deciding where and how their items are sold, not companies. “Our preference is that creators should be able to earn royalties in all markets they whitelist, rather than being forced to choose. To encourage this, Blur imposes full royalties on collections that block trade on OpenSea,” they wrote in the blog post.
They continued: “OpenSea has mainly cited Blur’s policy on unfiltered old collections as the reason why Blur still needs to be filtered by new collections. However, their proposed solution is seriously flawed… so Blur has taken a different approach that has a better chance of resolving the issue for good.”
The response to the publication was immediate. Many members of the Web3 community took to Twitter and began posting about a new era in royalty wars. It remains to be seen who will win this war. But for now, one thing is clear: the creators are caught in the middle.
Editor’s Note: This was breaking news and has been updated.
