OpenSea Introduces Support for ERC-721C Earnings Standard

OpenSea, a nonfungible tokens (NFT) trading platform, has announced that it now supports the ERC-721C token standard, which allows creators to set and enforce royalties. This new feature enables creators on OpenSea to easily enforce their earnings through a simple click. The ERC-721C token standard was developed by blockchain gaming company Limit Break in May of last year. It aims to address the issue of NFT wash trading by standardizing token transfer conditions, including royalties, across different channels.

Before the introduction of ERC-721C, users could bypass creator royalties on secondary markets like OpenSea and Blur by transferring NFTs through self-custody wallets or other NFT marketplaces that didn’t honor creators’ royalty requirements. This resulted in a situation where users could trade NFTs without paying any fees or royalties, effectively treating them as fungible tokens rather than nonfungible ones. This practice of wash-trading NFTs among their own wallets was detrimental to the NFT industry.

OpenSea developers revealed that the compatibility for ERC-721C was made possible by the March 13 Dencun upgrade on the Ethereum network. By enforcing creator earnings according to the designated steps, the sales would only be supported on OpenSea and other marketplaces powered by Limit Break’s Payment Processor.

After the deployment of the ERC-721C contract on OpenSea, creators still have the option to manually list their digital artwork on other marketplaces. OpenSea will match the lowest royalties available on other platforms as set by the creator. OpenSea’s new feature is also compatible with Seaport 1.6, its programming tool that enables NFTs to be sold under specific conditions, such as changing metadata in response to sale volume.

Although the specific royalty percentage is at the discretion of the creator, NFT royalties generally range between 2.5% to 10% per sale. It is worth noting that the top 10 NFT collections have already earned a total of over $345 million in royalties since their inception.