NFT Marketplace LooksRare Makes Creator Royalties Optional

• Solana NFT marketplace Magic Eden took a similar tack earlier this month.
• LooksRare also said that it will allocate 25% of its protocol fee to authors.

With today’s announcement, Ethereum NFT marketplace LooksRare has joined the growing trend of NFT marketplaces abandoning enforcement of creator royalties by no longer requiring traders to pay these fees on transactions.

In a recent blog post, LooksRare said that it would “no longer support creator royalties by default” when traders sell NFTs, but rather provide purchasers the opportunity to “opt-in to pay optional royalties.” Solana NFT marketplace Magic Eden took a similar tack earlier this month when it revealed that artist royalties will be discretionary on the platform.

NFT Bear Market

However, LooksRare also said that it will allocate 25% of its protocol fee (the cost it charges buyers to transact their NFTs) to authors. Since LooksRare takes a 2% cut of the selling price overall, this implies that artists will now get 0.5% of the sale price instead of the standard 5% that would have gone to them as royalties.

Many NFT developers want to have a small percentage of any secondary sale—typically between 5 and 10 percent of the price—remitted to them automatically by the marketplace in which the NFT was first sold. However, certain markets have taken advantage of the fact that these royalties are not entirely enforced on-chain using existing NFT standards in order to entice traders.

Due to the continuing crypto and NFT bear market, Ethereum marketplaces like Sudoswap and X2Y2 have either abolished or made creator royalties optional in recent months. More so on Solana, where Magic Eden, with a 90% share of the Solana network’s market, succumbed and did the same after seeing others do it. 

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