Important facts:
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Investor Mark Cuban criticized the changes.
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Governance tokens like APE have also lost value these days.
A recent royalty decision by non-fungible token (NFT) marketplace OpenSea has caused the price of several projects to drop, including Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC), Mutant Ape Yacht Club (MAYC), DeGods and Azuki.
In general, the market capitalization of NFTs applies decreased from US$6.5 billion to US$6.2 billion, in a week. This corresponds to a decrease of 4%.
In the case of BAYC, the average price of tokens in this collection went from 30.02 ETH ($50,200) to 24.45 ETH ($40,900) in a week. The corresponds to a decrease of 18.5%.
The APE token, which is used to control the BAYC ecosystem, also suffered a significant drop. The asset traded at $2.11 a week ago and is currently at $1.56, down 26% in seven days.
Not only BAYC had to accept a drop in prices. In the case of the collectibles called Mutant Ape Yacht Club (MAYC), also from Yuga Labs, their average price was 6.09 ETH ($10,000) a week ago and is currently 4.6 ETH ($7,700), down from corresponds to 24%.
Another NFT project whose median price fell was DeGods. It was trading at 7.1 ETH (11,800 USD) seven days ago; At the time of writing this article, it is 4 ETH ($6,600). That’s a 43% drop.
The Azuki collection also lost value. The average price of this collection was 5.07 ETH ($8,400) a week ago. It is currently at 3.59 ETH ($6,000), down 29%.
OpenSea and its new license fee policy
The OpenSea measure was reported on August 17th. in one release They explained that Optional royalties or copyright fees would decrease “in an effort to better reflect the principles of choice and ownership that drive this decentralized ecosystem.”
The measure goes into effect on Thursday 31 August for all new collections and from March 2024 all artist royalties would be optional.
However, OpenSea will gradually stop charging copyright fees on secondary sales They’re not going to get rid of royalties entirelydeclares one of the largest marketplaces in the NFT market.
This means that collection creators like BAYC and many others will stop collecting part of their royalties, which is a significant income for these companies. A post from 2022 suggests The BAYC earned $35 million just by operating in OpenSea until November of this year.
OpenSea’s decision was not well received by Yuga Labs, the company behind the founding of BAYC and the CryptoPunks. In this sense, Indian This will block the ability to trade your latest NFTs on OpenSea in February 2024.
Yuga Labs wasn’t the only one to complain. Also OpenSea businessman and shareholder Mark Cuban expressed his opposition to the new marketplace policy.
“It is a big mistake by OpenSea not to collect and pay license fees for NFT sales. It reduced trust in the platform and hurt the industry. And I say that as an OpenSea investor”, wrote on X (formerly Twitter).