Bored Ape Yacht Club Parts Ways with OpenSea
Yuga Labs, the group behind the popular NFT collection called Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC), is planning to stop using OpenSea due to changes in how they pay creators.
In a tweet on Saturday, Yuga Labs said they will gradually stop using OpenSea because a tool called Operator Filter, which helps enforce that creators get paid when their NFTs are resold, is going away soon.
Starting from February 2024, Yuga Labs will stop using OpenSea’s SeaPort for certain contracts and new collections. They are doing this in sync with OpenSea’s plans.
OpenSea added the Operator Filter tool last year to make sure that NFT creators get paid when their art is sold again. This tool stopped certain platforms like Blur from selling NFTs in a way that didn’t pay creators.
But OpenSea recently said they will stop using this tool by the end of August because not many people were using it, and some platforms found ways to avoid it. Creators also had mixed feelings about it.
Yuga Labs responded on Twitter by saying they’ll stop using OpenSea’s Seaport slowly. They want to make sure creators keep getting paid fairly for their work.
The BAYC community and other NFT creators supported Yuga Labs’ decision. They think it’s important for creators to use marketplaces that care about paying them properly.
This issue about paying creators for their work has caused arguments in the NFT community. In the past year, some platforms started not paying creators as much. This changed things because before that, it was normal to make sure creators got paid when their art was sold again.
This change happened because of platforms like Blur, which came in 2022 and didn’t charge as much for trading NFTs. They also let creators choose if they wanted to get paid again when their art was resold. This made other platforms do the same to compete.
Right now, there are two sides in the NFT community: some like the cheaper way of trading on platforms like Blur and want different ways to pay creators again, and others want to keep paying creators like before.