NFT marketplace OpenSea is sunsetting its on-chain royalty enforcement tool — Operator Filter — that allows creators to blacklist NFT marketplaces that don’t enforce royalties.
The change is set to take effect on Aug. 31, according to an Aug. 17 statement by OpenSea founder and CEO Devin Finzer.The Operator Filter feature was first introduced in November 2022 and was described as a “simple code snippet” that could restrict NFT sales to only marketplaces that enforced creator fees.
However, Finzer said that the tool hadn’t had the success they had hoped, as it didn’t have the needed support from the NFT ecosystem.
Finzer claimed that NFT marketplaces such as Blur, Dew and Looks Rare had circumvented the Operator Filter by integrating the Seaport Protocol to bypass OpenSea’s blacklist and therefore avoid creator fees.
Finally, Finzer explained that while creator fees are useful for certain business models, its only one of many revenue streams available to creators and there are a number of other use cases of NFT technology that need to be considered.
