OpenSea, the leading NFT marketplace, has made significant announcements in the last few hours. OpenSea announced several changes to their fee and royalty structure via their official Twitter account, which will significantly impact user activity on the NFT platform – both collectors and creators.
OpenSea Will Make Significant Changes
On Friday, February 17, OpenSea first stated that it would implement a 0% transaction fee policy – albeit for a limited time. Before this announcement, OpenSea charged a 2.5% trade levy, which accounted for a significant portion of its revenue.
Along with this announcement, OpenSea announced that it will now use “optional creator earnings,” requiring collectors to pay only a 0.5% royalty fee on all new and old NFT projects that lack an on-chain enforcement method. Users may, however, pay a higher percentage if they so desire.
This change has been the most appealing aspect of OpenSea’s new changes, as creators typically receive a royalty fee of 5%-10% of the sale price, which serves as the primary source of ongoing revenue for NFT collections after their initial launch.
With the recent policy change, OpenSea joins a slew of other NFT marketplaces focusing on trader incentives rather than collectors.
“Today, 80 percent of total ecosystem volume does not pay full creator earnings, & most of the volume (even accounting for inorganic activity) has moved to a zero-fee environment,” OpenSea explained. While we continue to enforce on-chain through the operator filter, we are transitioning to a new fee structure that reflects the needs of today’s ecosystem.”
The Major Changes at OpenSea Happen Against the Background of Ongoing Rivalry Using Blur
Blur, a new NFT marketplace launched in November 2022, has taken the web3 world by storm, becoming one of the fastest-growing projects in the blockchain space. Despite only three months of operation, Blur is now the second-largest NFT marketplace in daily trading volume, trailing only OpenSea.
Blur has dominated the news recently as OpenSea’s main competitor, giving the world’s largest marketplace a run for its money. According to Nansen.ai data, Blur temporarily outperformed OpenSea in daily trading volume on Wednesday for the first time.
Although this advancement was primarily fueled by the recent launch of Blur’s native token, BLUR, the platform has demonstrated enough potential to unseat OpenSea as the world’s leading NFT marketplace.
Furthermore, both parties have issued outright battle statements, with Blur giving an official blog post advising its users to boycott OpenSea due to the platform’s previous policy, which prevented creators from earning royalties on two trading platforms.
However, there appears to be some resolution following OpenSea’s new operator filter policy that will not block operations with platforms with similar approaches, such as Blur.
Despite Blur’s impressive progress in recent months, OpenSea remains the largest NFT marketplace. Following its buzzing announcement yesterday, OpenSea has stated that it intends to maintain or even improve its 23% market dominance.
