Magic Eden, a Solana-based nonfungible token marketplace, has released a tool allowing creators to enforce royalties on their collections.
It comes after competitor NFT marketplace OpenSea revealed a comparable feature at the beginning of November. The Open Creator Protocol is the name of the open-source tool for enforcing royalties, which is built on top of Solana’s SPL token standard. As of December 2, this will enable royalty enforcement for new collections that choose to adopt the standard.
At Solana’s Breakpoint 2022 conference on November 5, Lu first proposed the idea of NFTs built to enforce royalties, citing the necessity for NFT creators to have a “sustained revenue model.”
Additionally, OCP users will be able to block marketplaces from selling their works if they don’t enforce royalties. For collections that do not implement OCP, Magic Eden will continue to offer optional royalties on its platform.
In a Dec. 1 Twitter thread, Magic Eden said it “can’t retroactively apply OCP to existing collections,” telling creators they will have to conduct “burn [and] re-mints” where the NFTs are sent to an unrecoverable wallet address and re-issued by the collection. Lu said in the statement:
“We have been in active conversations with multiple ecosystem partners to identify solutions for creators in a timely manner,”
He added the marketplace’s intention with OCP was to “immediately support royalties” for new collections while it coordinates with other partners for more solutions.
The protocol promoted by Magic Eden also includes customizable token transferability, which could see, for example, NFTs limited to a certain number of trades or be subject to a trade freeze for a specific amount of time. Creators can also introduce dynamic royalties, which could lower the value of royalties for buyers who pay higher prices.
Magic Eden switched to an optional royalties model in October, giving customers the freedom to choose the royalties they want to give to projects. This decision divided the NFT community on Twitter.
The OCP tool is a follow-up to an analogous on-chain tool that OpenSea introduced in the first few days of November and that limited NFT sales to only marketplaces enforcing royalties.
Before switching to optional royalties in September, Magic Eden developed a similar tool for enforcing royalties called MetaShield in collaboration with peer marketplace and aggregator Coral Cube.
