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Marketplaces skirting royalties + Do Kwon sighting!
Decentra Daily
August 16, 2022
GM, welcome back to the freshly rebranded Decentra Daily, where we matchmake you with the best Web3 information out there.
Estimated read time: 3 minutes
Today's stories:
Marketplaces and NFT royalties - a conundrum
Do Kwon comes out of hiding
Top NFT sales of the day
Some marketplaces don’t honor NFT royalties
What’s up with that?
One of the many claimed benefits of NFTs is how easy they make it to track ownership on the secondary market.
No matter how many times an artwork, song, or tied-physical object is sold, NFTs should keep a neat, accessible record tracing back to the creator.
This means collecting royalties on second-hand media should be a cinch for artists and creators.
– Except, it seems the reality isn’t that simple.
Some recently opened NFT marketplaces are already questioning the royalty model, by letting sellers decide if they want to pay up, or by wiping seller fees altogether.
Marketplaces that don’t F with royalties:
What’s the deal?
Royalties (or “seller fees”) are a traditional revenue model for musicians, writers, and other artists whose work is frequently passed around secondary markets.
Most people in web3 support the idea that creators should continue to be paid for their work downstream. But how much royalties should cost – and who should pay them – isn’t a given.
While the smart contract tech behind NFTs makes it easy to set up a royalty arrangement and track who owes money, there’s nothing inherent in current chain coding that makes paying a necessity.
Which means that paying royalties is more of an ethical argument than a technological or even legal one.
So while today’s biggest marketplaces (OpenSea, Magic Eden, LooksRare) are all onboard with creator fees, tomorrow’s competitors may not be.
Maybe change the approach?
I like the idea of royalties as a way of encouraging and supporting more time-intensive NFT projects.
If an artist feels confident they’ll receive long-term downstream revenue, they’ll be more likely to invest their time in creative, innovative work.
But, if the wider market isn’t keen on NFT royalties, there are other ways for artists to ensure an income.
For example, creators could hold back some of their NFTs for personal sale. Or, as Beeple says, focus on nurturing a royalty-positive community that’s willing to support creative work into the future:
Do Kwon gets interviewed!
"Doh! Kwon"
It's hard to know what to call Do Kwon. Shall we call him Doh! Kwon? because he f*cked up. Or maybe Dough Kwon? because he likely made a bunch whilst losing everyone else's 'dough'.
Coinage managed to get in a room with Do, 3 months after the collapse of Luna, the fall of the $40b+ crypto giant, which played a part in the crypto collapse and consequent bear market.
Do Kwon looked beaten down in this interview, a far cry from the confident and exuberant crypto enigma we once knew.
There were no huge revelations from the interview, with Do operating as you'd expect, not taking full responsibility, etc. Here are the top takeaways we noticed whilst watching the video:
Do Kwon does not believe he defrauded anyone: He was confident that TerraUSD (UST) and Luna were the future. And that this algorithmic stablecoin was working perfectly until the 'attack'.
Do goes full conspiracy theorist: He believes that it was an inside job, and that only employees would know the perfect time that Luna would be vulnerable.
Denies comparisons to Elizabeth Holmes: Holmes was named by Forbes the youngest self-made female billionaire in the U.S. in 2015. She knowingly lied about a blood testing product. Do Kwon says that his product was working perfectly, and as such didn't lie to anyone. So the comparison is not valid to him.
He is sticking around: Do believes that whatever he does next will have a bigger impact than what happened with Luna (god we hope not).
This appears like a classic situation of someone in way over their head and getting caught up in the mania. Do said he developed an alter ego on Twitter to match the communities enthusiasm (so he's blaming the community for his big head and outlandish statements?).
Let's hope people keep grilling this guy, he lost people a lot of Dough...Kwon.
Top NFT sales of the day
@OthersideMeta Otherdeed #25415 - 169.275 WETH ($335,457.34)
@BoredApeYC #3113 - 92.6316 ETH ($175,919.86)
@BoredApeYC #4351 - 89 ETH ($169,022)
@BoredApeYC #3969 - 82 ETH ($155,728.14)
Yuga Labs leads the market once more! Which isn't news at this point haha.
Headlines of the day
Disclaimer: Nothing in this article/newsletter should be considered financial advice. The purpose is to inform readers of the current trends and news in the web3 space. We encourage every reader to do their own research and not act upon information put forth by Decentra Daily.