On November 10, the largest NFT marketplace by trading volume, OpenSea announced that it will continue to enforce creator royalties on NFTs following significant pushback from the community. 

“We will continue to enforce creator fees on all existing collections,” the firm wrote in a tweet thread on Thursday. “We’re awed by the passion we’ve seen from creators and collectors alike this week. We were looking for your feedback, and we heard it, loud and clear.” 

On November 5, OpenSea said that it was rethinking its strategy towards implementing creator royalty fees on NFTs, following an influx of opponent marketplaces that had either rejected such fees or made them optional for dealers to pay. The NFT artist or creator set a royalty fee which typically falls in the range of 5% and 10% of the secondary sale price. 

At that point, OpenSea said it would consider options going from implementing off-chain fees for “some subsets of collections,” to permitting “optional creator fees,” to teaming up “with other on-chain enforcement options for creators.” 

November 7’s declaration saw huge pushback from the community, encouraging OpenSea to explain its position, noting the informing was unclear, while others took issue with its “optional creator fee” suggestion. 

OpenSea set a self-inflicted deadline till December 8 to take in community feedback and consider possible courses of action, including making creator fees optional for traders, which only enforcing them on some types of NFT collections, or carrying out new enforcement methods. 

The potential for the market’s biggest NFT platform to stop enforcing royalties did not sit well with many prominent creators—including the creator of Bored Ape Yacht Club, Yuga Labs—who vocally stood up against OpenSea and started coordinating amongst themselves.