NFT royalties fall, market cap slumps but who takes the blame

On Jul 6, 2023

NFT royalties reached the lowest value in two years due to a lack of liquidity and certain restrictions.
Blur’s founder rejected the claim that the marketplace’s policies were responsible.

The worth of royalties earned by NFT creators reached a two-year low, according to data from Nansen. By definition, royalties are a way for the creator of an NFT to earn a certain amount from the secondary sale of the digital asset.

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For example, when a creator sells his work, the owner gets a portion of the sale price. And this enables the original creator to keep getting rewards for the work put into inventing the asset.

Bad sales conditions lead us here

The decline implies that transaction within the ecosystem has not been as impressive as creators would have envisioned. And yes, the reasons have been glaring. An undeniable one is the widespread bear market in the crypto sector.

Source: Nansen

However, the decline in earnings has also been attributed to the policies of OpenSea and Blur. As a matter of fact, Blur’s dominance in the NFT market could be linked to its royalties’ conditions.

In February, Blur enforced a royalty fee of 0.5% in its bid to knock OpenSea off the top marketplace standings. Days later, OpenSea followed the same path for projects that have on-chain enforcement. It also reduced its usual 2.5% commission on sales to fight off Blur’s competition.

But the market challenges have not been limited to royalties alone. Rather, many collections including Ethereum [ETH]-based blue-chip assets have been affected. Recently, the floor price of Azuki, one of the collections which thrived in the 2021 bull market, fell to 6.8 ETH.

As of that time, other collections including Yuga Labs Bored Ape Yacht Club [BAYC] and Mutant Ape Yacht Club [MAYC] still had an impressive sales record and volume.

However, press time data from CoinMarketCap showed that the tides have changed. At the time of writing, BAYC’s volume had decreased by 49.18% in the last 24 hours. Unsurprisingly, Azuki’s volume fell by 63.14% while MAYC slumped to 947.56 ETH.

NFT collections sales, volume, and floor price

Source: CoinMarketCap

Blames behind the scenes

The low volume signifies inefficiency in trades. Furthermore, it meant that buyers were failing to meet the asking prices of sellers. This lack of consistent liquidity also affected the NFT market cap negatively as it fell to $2.75 billion.

Meanwhile, Blur’s founder Tieshun Roquerre responded to the criticism that the marketplace was responsible for the recently experienced capitulation.

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Earlier, a certain Twitter user with the handle “sebsebseb_eth” had mentioned that volatility and much lower liquidity were to blame and not Blur.

Roquerre, in Blur’s defense, argued that the marketplace played a vital role in the times when the floor prices of some collections increased. Like sebsebseb_eth, the founder noted that liquidity was responsible for the decline, and urged participants to quit shifting blame.

I don’t usually comment on these kinds of discussions but I will say this:
We launched in October 22. Since then, some floor prices have gone up, some floor prices have gone down.
One of the few times floor prices went up in concert was when we injected liquidity into nfts via… https://t.co/8bsZcvDuD9
— Pacman | Blur.io (@PacmanBlur) July 5, 2023