Magic Eden launches a tool protecting creators’ royalties

Open Creator Protocol, as the new open-source free tool is named, is built on Solana’s managed-token standard in the SPL library, as described by the Magic Eden team. The tool is the marketplace’s latest response to the still ongoing royalties debate in the NFT scene.

🧵 Today's a big day!

We’re excited to launch Open Creator Protocol, an open source, free, feature-rich tool built on Solana's managed-token standard in the SPL library, for creators to protect royalties on new collections.

We hope it becomes 1 of many royalty protection tools. pic.twitter.com/IZq4QscXaI
— Magic Eden 🪄 (@MagicEden) December 1, 2022

As DeFi Teller reported, in the middle of October Magic Eden announced it will no longer be forcing its users to pay creator fees when trading NFTs but would make that optional, as many other marketplaces were doing at the time. While many platforms were converting to the new norm, OpenSea first launched a tool protecting creator royalties meant for emerging collections, however that meant leaving legacy NFT projects, such as BAYC, with optional creator fees enforcement. What followed was wide community backlash triggered by a blog post written by one of Yuga Labs’ founders which made OpenSea shift its stance regarding protecting creator royalties fees.

Now, Magic Eden seems to also be changing its approach towards enforcing royalties. The new tool released by the company is described as allowing NFT creators to blacklist marketplaces that do not respect royalties and is said to be decentralized so that no 1 party can change its code. The Magic Eden team plans to migrate the new protocol into other tools and is currently discussing non-commercial standard governance with the Metaplex and Solana teams.

Furthermore, the new tool comes packed with various features that will allow creators to manage their royalties. It will permit creators to change the percentage of the fee by item sale amount, limit trading until the mint is done, and create various rules for NFT transfers.

While the Open Creators Protocol will be available to all emerging NFT collections, the new protocol cannot be applied retroactively to existing collections. This means all projects which don’t adopt the new tool, as well as all legacy NFT projects on MagicEden will remain with optional royalty fees. For these cases, the marketplace stated it is considering Burn & Re-mints, encouraging interested parties to contact it.