Header image: Money Management by KungfhuHavestyle
MakersPlace has always been a firm supporter of creators. We strive to make creators successful in all things we do and have created sophisticated tools and services to help creators best create, promote, and sell their works.
We have also launched groundbreaking programs to help emerging NFT creators break into the market and attain success, as clearly shown in our recent Africa Here and Equal Bytes initiatives which will launch and accelerate the careers of African and women creators, respectively. We will continue to find innovative ways to lift up and celebrate the creativity of artists and creators across the globe.
Given this, we strongly believe that creators should be able to collect royalties on secondary sales as this represents one of the strengths and unique aspects of the NFT market.
MakersPlace has supported all industry standards efforts in this area. We stand by our creators and want them to have every opportunity to reap fair rewards for their creative work, and royalties are one aspect of those fair rewards.
In our view, in a decentralized NFT market, market forces should work to find the right royalty level. Today creators can choose to set royalties, and collectors can choose what they want to buy, and if they don’t like the royalty for a particular NFT, they don’t have to buy it.
Over time royalty levels should and will adjust to appropriate market forces, and different royalty structures for different classes of NFTs may evolve over time.
The trend to eliminate royalties on all classes of NFTs on some chains is being driven mainly by the secondary market for collections. While this is obviously an important segment in the overall NFT market, establishing a new royalty regime for the entire industry is wrong and, frankly, a knee-jerk reaction by some marketplaces.
While making payments to creators in secondary sales optional will result in some income for creators, the idea that this will have broad support is like saying you’d willingly choose to pay income taxes if you had the choice. We also don’t want the NFT market to go the way of the music industry, where it is almost impossible for most creative music artists to make a living on the rates paid by streaming services.
Finally, removing royalty requirements is already accelerating the number of wash sales in the marketplaces that support this approach, which harms the credibility and trust in those marketplaces and the NFT industry at large.
MakersPlace will continue to fight to make creators successful and fairly paid. We will continue to support royalties on secondary sales as a key and unique aspect of the NFT market. We believe that working within the current royalty regime is the right approach and will continue to work with our community and willing partners to continue to improve the way royalties payments are facilitated across the market.
