• by Colin Kirkland , August 18, 2023

This ideal is changing. At the end of the month, leading NFT marketplace OpenSea will stop collecting mandatory creator fees on sales of digital collectibles, making it optional for sellers to pay NFT artists for their work.

The marketplace's decision to stop enforcing royalty fees is happening by way of the sunsetting of its Operator Filter, which was launched in November 2022 and restricted secondary sales to web3 marketplaces that enforce creator fees.

“We relied on opt-in by the entire ecosystem, which didn't happen,” the company wrote in

The tool did not gain the needed support from the NFT ecosystem, said OpenSea founder and CEO Devin Finzer in a recent statement, adding that competing NFT marketplaces like Blur, Dew and LooksRare undermined the Operator Filter by integrating a protocol that bypassed OpenSea’s list of restricted marketplaces.

Despite the company's claims to assure creators be paid for their work, Finzer said that OpenSea received negative feedback from creators who felt there was a lack of control over how and where their collections were sold.

Other creators, like Wildcake, founder of the Posers NFT collection, are offended by OpenSea’s policy change, telling The Verge that the changes are “fundamentally wrong and hurt the entire NFT space.”

Beginning August 31, the Operator Filter will stop blocking marketplaces.

But collections that enabled the filter prior to August 31 -- as well as existing collections on all non-Ethereum blockchains -- will still see the enforcement of creators’ preferred fees on secondary sales through February 29, 2024.

“To be clear, creator fees are not going away -- just the ineffective, unilateral enforcement of them,” Finzer said, alluding to OpenSea's further goal of empowering “innovation beyond a single use case of business model.”

He added: "Starting on Thursday, August 31, 2023 we're moving to optional creator fees on OpenSea in an effort to better reflect the principles of choice and ownership that drive this decentralized ecosystem. At a high level, this means four main things:

Others, including OpenSea, are trying to frame it as a necessarily, positive change as the marketplace evolves. Finzer criticized the fees’ “ineffective, unilateral enforcement” and said that creators will find other ways to monetize their work.

“Our role in this ecosystem is to empower innovation beyond a single use case or business model,” Finzer wrote in the blog post announcing that OpenSea will no longer support the ecosystem’s primary business model.