Yuga Labs Blacklists Royalty-avoiding Marketplaces

Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) creator Yuga Labs has blacklisted addresses from marketplaces that don’t support royalties for NFTs like its latest Sewer Pass mint.

Differing perspectives on the enforcement of creator royalties has been a hot topic among NFT stakeholders, including marketplaces, some of which have decided to make them optional. 

BAYC had already announced that the Sewer Pass NFT will be listed on OpenSea, which enforces royalties for projects.

“We’ve always been a creative-first company, and we believe that creator royalties must be protected,” a Yuga Labs spokesperson told Blockworks via email. “The Sewer Pass free claim will only be traded on platforms respecting creator royalties.”

LooksRare, Sudoswap, Blur and NFTX have all opted to stay away from the NFT royalty model, instead leaving the option to the buyers to decide whether to honor an artist’s royalty policy. Blockworks has reached out for comment.

Certain conditions in the Sewer Pass smart contract include a blocklist of certain wallet addresses, which were noticed by the crypto community and shared on Twitter. 

Some of those addresses appear to be linked to marketplaces like LooksRare, NFTX, Blur and SudoSwap.

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NFT royalties are essentially payouts to creators, offering them a cut from the secondary sale of their digital assets on a marketplace. Beeple, one of the best-known NFT creators, himself gets a 10% royalty each time his NFTs are resold after the initial sale.

The Sewer Pass is a key providing access to Yuga’s skill-based interactive game Dookey Dash, a game in which players will face obstacles testing their survival until top scorers can earn rewards. 

The pass has four tiers, depending on the kind of NFTs the holder has. The floor price for a Tier 1 pass last stood at 1.4 ETH as of Thursday, while Tier 4 was selling for around 420 ETH. Currently, a trending collection, it’s already captured 6,510 ETH ($9.9 million) in sales volume since going live on Wednesday.

Yuga isn’t the only one to block marketplaces for their policy. NFT artist Tyler Hobbs added X2Y2 to a blacklist in his QQL collection due to its flexible royalty model. X2Y2 eventually changed its decision and followed OpenSea’s model.

This story was updated on Jan. 19, 2023 at 12:22 p.m. ET, with a statement from Yuga Labs.

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