The founder of Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) has weighed in on the ongoing nonfungible token (NFT) creator royalties debate and shared a potential path forward that they believe best deals with the issue.
A Nov. 8 blog post from BAYC co-founder Wylie Aronow — co-signed by co-founders Greg Solano and Kerem Atalay — shared that they regard creator royalties as “the single most important factor that brought them [creators and artists] into the ecosystem.”
The post was in response to OpenSea’s Nov. 6 announcement that it would follow other NFT marketplaces on royalty enforcement, which Aronow said shows its intent “to move with the rest of the herd and remove creator royalties for legacy collections from their platform,” and opined this move was “not great,” adding:
”For as much as NFTs have been about users truly owning their digital assets, they’ve also been about empowering creators.”
In response, the BAYC founders proposed a model for NFT royalties that uses “allow lists” coded into an NFT collections smart contract, which permits NFT trading between regular wallets but only allows NFT trading for “marketplaces that respect royalties.”
A basic version of how this would work was explained, with the first step being to check if the wallet is a regular wallet or a smart contract making the transfer request.
Regular…
