NFT
Twitter users are reacting to OpenSea’s continual policy changes and what appears to be a haphazard verification processes. Recent changes in the marketplace’s stance on creator royalties led to it changing its mind and eventually deciding that it will continue to impose creator fees on all existing collections..
Now users can point. out that OpenSea is verifying certain accounts while disabling others in an “unfair” way.
One user, nirozin, tweeted that all of his wallets were suddenly disabled on OpenSea “after 2 years of trading for a total of million of $ and thousands of NFT’s on several wallets.”
OpenSea Customer Experience responded to his email, stating that his accounts had been found to be in violation of their terms of service. However, they did not provide any additional explanation.
Nirozin’s collection is one of reportedly many smaller creators that may have been having issues getting verified.
Others assert the same. that OpenSea has been “stonewalling” verification and “manually removing the request verification button” for certain collections, naming OnChainBirds as an example.
OpenSea’s Thursday announcement regarding creator royalty fees was also received by users. In a Twitter thread, it said it will transfer ownership of the list of Ethereum marketplaces blocked for “not respecting creator fees” over to a multi-signature collective.
The collective is called Creator Ownership Research Institute (CORI) and includes OpenSea, Nifty Gateway, Zora, Manifold, SuperRare and Foundation as members that will enforce the use of the blocklisting “Operator Filter” tool that OpenSea introduced last month.
It supports the Royalty Registry, which is an on-chain contract that allows marketplaces to properly allocate royalties amounts to the correct recipients. CORI allows contracts that do not support on-chain royalties to add them.
One user said it gives the impression of a “cartel” and it would “better if it was controlled by respected artists and not by the marketplaces.”
Another user was warned “that if sufficient % of the cartel are forced to implement any unpopular feature they will try to force everyone to do it to avoid other exchanges from taking over their market share.”
OpenSea claims it is acting out an “existential imperative for the space to preserve creator fees.” However, this move comes at a time when NFT marketplaces are split between defending the royalty scheme for NFT creators and ensuring they keep their market share of users and sales volume. Customers may not have been happy with the company’s experiments with different policies.
OpenSea continues to be the most widely used marketplace for Ethereum non-fisted tokens. The platform recently reported that creators made over $1 billion from the creator fees for secondary NFT sales in 2022, excluding sponsorship revenue or grants.