Supporting the Creator Economy: The Sandbox’s Move for NFT Royalties

NFT royalties are reshaping how creators benefit financially from their work, transitioning them from one-time sales to sustained earnings. The Sandbox has embraced this concept, innovating its marketplace to facilitate a fair and automatic redistribution of royalties.

The Mechanics of NFT Royalties

When an NFT is minted, creators set a royalty percentage, entitling them to a portion of the sales from any future resale of the NFT. This mechanism protects the creator’s intellectual property rights and ensures ongoing compensation. While some platforms have integrated royalty systems, others rely on optional royalty payments, and some don’t enforce royalties at all, leaving creators without any secondary market earnings.

Implementing a Fair Royalty System at The Sandbox

At The Sandbox, the philosophy revolves around supporting a global creator economy by redistributing a portion of secondary market royalties back to the original NFT creators. This approach aims to foster long-term monetization for creators’ works. The Sandbox team has developed an internal solution that automatically redirects part of the ASSET‘s secondary market royalties to the original creator’s wallet. Launched on December 14, 2023, this feature aims to ensure that creators benefit directly from secondary sales of their assets.

Royalty Redistribution on The Sandbox Marketplace

In The Sandbox, ‘ASSETs’ are voxel assets intended to add content to various experiences, including games developed on LANDs. Besides their functional use, ASSETs can be collected, monetized, and traded.

Until now, The Sandbox has received a 5% royalty from secondary sales of ASSETs. With the upcoming feature, these royalties will be split equally between The Sandbox and the original NFT creator, each receiving 2.5%. This change automatically ensures that creators receive their fair share of secondary market sales. The mechanism will also be compatible with other marketplaces that adopt the ERC-2981 standard, with this accessibility planned for 2024, according to the Sandbox.

Creators utilizing The Sandbox Marketplace can have confidence that secondary market royalties will be reliably enforced and directly deposited into their wallets. This development by The Sandbox represents another stride in ensuring fair compensation for creators in the NFT marketplace. By facilitating an automatic and equitable redistribution of royalties, The Sandbox sets a precedent for how platforms can support their creator communities in the evolving digital art and assets world.