Bored Ape Yacht Club Founders Propose New Model For NFT Creator Royalties

Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) founder offered their opinion on the ongoing nonfungible token (NFT) creator royalties discussion and shared a potential course of action that, in their opinion, best addresses the problem.

iexclusivenews reports that -Co-founders Greg Solano and Kerem Atalay of BAYC and Wylie Aronow of BAYC wrote in a blog post dated Nov. 8. That they see creator royalties as “the single most important factor that brought 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.

Aronow deemed this decision “not great” and claimed that it demonstrates OpenSea’s intention “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 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.

What You Need To Know

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 found.

The Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) founders emphasize that free wallet-to-wallet transfers are necessary to ensure that asset ownership. One of the main advantages of NFTs, is recognized.

Owners would be able to transfer assets between wallets without paying any fees under this model.

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The BAYC founders acknowledge 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 relatively small, 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.”

However, iexclusivenews Nigeria reports that popular NFT artist Mike Winkelmann, aka Beeple, praised the post in a tweet on November 8. As a great way to safeguard creator royalties as many NFT marketplaces move away from them.