Creator royalties have recently gone out of favor in the Solana NFT industry, with major marketplace Magic Eden making them optional last week as royalty-averse competitors seized market share. Now, Metaplex, the company that created Solana’s NFT standard, claims it is working on a new standard that will impose royalty payments across the board.
Despite the continuing controversy about creator royalties, Metaplex announced on Thursday night, stating it is “creating a new asset class that will enable creators to enforce royalties at the protocol level.”
Although artists and creators may use project smart contracts—the code that allows autonomous, decentralized apps—to define their own royalty rates, markets can work around such constraints and ultimately decide whether or not to respect them. NFT traders may save between 5% and 10% on each sale. While this has mostly infuriated project developers who rely on such payments for revenue, NFT royalties are not enforceable under the existing Solana standard.
According to the company, the present Metaplex standard is adopted by more than 99% of the Solana NFTs that have been issued so far.
Metaplex claims it can generate enforceable royalties by extending its token metadata program, which is how NFT developers attach data and information that distinguishes NFTs—or blockchain tokens indicating ownership in an item—from one another.
According to the Twitter thread, Metaplex intends to embrace several NFT asset standards within its framework, giving authors alternatives for future projects. Because Metaplex technology is now extensively accepted by markets and wallets, it may be ideally adapted to implementing such modifications that might have a large influence on the whole Solana creation community.
