The Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) founders offered their opinion on the continuing non-fungible token (NFT) creator royalties issue and suggested a potential course of action that, in their opinion, best addresses the problem.
Co-founders Greg Solano, Kerem Atalay, and Wylie Aronow of BAYC wrote in a blog post dated Nov. 8 that they see creator royalties as “the single most critical aspect that pulled them [creators and artists] into the ecosystem.”
The article was written in response to OpenSea’s Nov. 6 announcement that it would follow other NFT marketplaces on royalty enforcement, which Aronow opined was “not great” and showed its intent to “move with the rest of the herd and remove creator royalties for legacy collections from their platform.”
”For as much as NFTs have been about users truly owning their digital assets, they’ve also been about empowering creators.”
In response, the creators of BAYC presented a solution for NFT royalties that makes use of “allow lists” encoded in a smart contract for NFT collections, allowing NFT trading only for “marketplaces that respect royalties” and prohibiting it between normal wallets.
A simplified explanation of how this might operate stated that the first stage would be to determine whether the wallet making the transfer request is a conventional wallet or a smart contract.
Transfer requests would be permitted for regular wallets, but smart contract transfers are checked against “an oracle of contracts that are known to respect royalties,” with approval granted if a match is discovered.
In order to ensure that one of the main advantages of NFTs, asset ownership, is recognized and owners are allowed to move assets between wallets without fees, the BAYC founders underline that this model must allow free wallet-to-wallet transfers.
The BAYC creators agree that this model still has drawbacks, citing allowlist upkeep and a higher barrier to entry for new markets, but noted that for the time being, this allowlist is very modest, noting:
“To start with, there are only a handful of known good actors today. Starting the allowlist is easy–just add those couple marketplaces that pay creator fees. Done.”
They consider allowlist maintenance to be the more difficult problem, particularly the composition of the governing body, adding:
“The real work is just in figuring out what this governing body looks like. But I think that’s a solvable problem for the NFT ecosystem to take on.”
Popular NFT artist Mike Winkelmann, as Beeple, praised the post in a tweet on November 8 as a great method to safeguard creator royalties while many NFT marketplaces shift away from them.