With NFTs, the only constant has been change. How full-time artists navigate the chaos

The moment you walk into Pace Gallery’s location on West 25th Street in New York City, the large glass doors and gleaming white walls immediately give off an aura of exclusivity.

Not long ago, the fine art world embodied by Pace did not include NFT artists or many of the newcomers who have since made a name for themselves with the blockchain-based technology. Nevertheless, until April 22, as part of the Web3 hub Pace Verso, the gallery is hosting an exhibition by Tyler Hobbs, one of the best-selling NFT artists and creator of Fidenzaa series of 999 floating generative artworks composed of multicolored blocks, each going for a minimum of around $115,000 at OpenSea.

QQL: Analogs, Hobbs’ Pace Gallery exhibit of real-life paintings—each including its own NFT—shows how far non-fungible tokens have come since the first collections appeared in niche corners of the internet five years ago. It also exemplifies the artist-focused side of two increasingly competitive factions when it comes to creator royalties, something the high-speed trading types that defined the market frenzy of 2021 care little about.

NFT artists who program royalties into the smart contract, or the underlying technology behind the work, are paid a percentage—typically 5% to 10%—every time an NFT is sold. On a $10,000 sale, an artist might get $1,000, but if it later sells for $100,000, the cut is multiplied tenfold, and from just two sales, the artist has gotten a total of $11,000.

However, for those NFTs that do not have hard-coded royalties for their technology (which may include older compilations or compilations from smaller artists), the two leading marketplaces Blur and OpenSea have reduced the minimum royalty to 0.5%, with the option to pay up to 10% on OpenSea and an unlimited percentage on Blur. At 0.5%, a $10,000 secondary sale of an artist’s work will net them just $50.

Lower creator fees change the calculus for NFT artists – while a new NFT collection of profile pictures can launch every day, artists like Hobbs are more aware. Benjamin Tritt, founder of robotic painting company Artmatr, which partnered with Hobbs for the exhibit at Pace, said it was the result of a nine-month effort. The mission: to get people interested in art and “push painting forward,” Hobbs said Fortune at the exhibition at the end of March.

“I’m mostly really excited that other people are really resonating with it and that other people are seeing interest for the same reasons I’m seeing interest,” he said.

While many lesser-known artists in the NFT space undoubtedly have similar motivations to Hobbs, the looming threat of diminishing royalties across marketplaces has them rethinking how they ply their craft—and make a living.

For Art Blocks creator and generative artist Melissa Wiederrecht, fewer royalties mean a distraction from cultivating her fan base, she said, preventing her from taking the time to make her projects better. About 15% to 25% of her income comes from royalties, and she’s already seen a monthly decline, though she admitted it could be due to declining interest.

For new collections, Wiederrecht partly adapts to the inconsistency of creator fees by withholding multiple works in a given collection. For a recent gathering on NFT Marketplace Verse, Wiederrecht said she kept 106 of the 916 pieces, more than she would normally have kept.

“If my work took off being as valuable as a Fidenzabut then there were no royalties and people are trading my work for $1 million apiece, so I wanted some and I could potentially sell one at some point and also have a piece of that upside,” she explained.

Fewer people buying her current or older collections could cost her financially, but so could producing too many pieces too quickly.

“I don’t mind posting new work all the time,” Wiederrecht told me Fortune. “But I fear it will flood my market, and with it possibly devalue my older work.”

All of this is in addition to fending off scammers offering fake artwork. She said she spots fakes every few weeks, especially fraudulent pieces from her Art Blocks collection Sudfah– Arabic for “happy accident”. On one occasion, a hacker put together a compilation using unfinished pieces she had tweeted, which bothered her because she had yet to release them. (As part of an effort to stem the spread of fakes, Art Blocks recently launched its own secondary marketplace.)

Courtesy of Melissa Wiederrecht

Jake Rockland, chief technology officer at Art Blocks, told us Fortune that the creator royalties each artist chooses are baked into the platform for each collection, even those that have not hard-coded the royalty percentage in their smart contracts. Enforcing royalties, he said, helps artists and discourages those who just want to flip the NFTs for profit.

“Art Blocks is not a good place for them to shop,” he said.

If an artist wants a 10% royalty for an NFT, they can get that percentage of a sale through the Art Blocks marketplace.

On the largest marketplace, OpenSea, royalties are still enforced, with some caveats. Artists can use OpenSea’s on-chain enforcement “operator filter” to ensure new collections receive their desired royalty amount – the tool allows them to hardcode that figure into the smart contracts. The catch is that this will block the NFTs from being listed on marketplaces that don’t enforce royalties, meaning the chips won’t reach as many potential buyers.

Older collections need their smart contracts updated. If an older collection doesn’t – or can’t – get its code updated, it will default to a 0.5% minimum royalty. There is an option to pay more (up to 10%), but only if the seller generously sets the percentage higher – and there is little incentive to do so since this fee is deducted from what the seller has paid.

Some NFT marketplaces welcome traders who want to make money and have little, if any, interest in making sure artists get paid.

Blur, a newcomer that launched in October, was one of the first to target “pro NFT traders” with its promise of 0% trading fees and optional royalties. It later began enforcing a minimum royalty of 0.5%, and once it overtook royalty and market leader OpenSea in trading volume, the company jumped to temporarily removing the 2.5% trading fee and lowering the minimum royalty to match Blur’s 0.5% for certain collections.

OpenSea last week reinstated the 2.5% trading fee on its platform following the launch of a new OpenSea Pro product, but kept the lower 0.5% creator fee in place on the new professional trader-focused platform for legacy collections and those that do not using the operator filter tool, according to an OpenSea spokesperson.

“While creator revenue will remain a crucial part of broader NFT revenue, we believe creators and developers will introduce new and complementary business models around the technology,” OpenSea chief business officer Shiva Rajaraman said in a statement.

While secondary marketplaces are being pulled in both directions by those on either side of the royalty debate, the NFT market just had its best quarter since mid-2022. NFT trading volume increased to $4.7 billion in the first quarter, up 137% from the last measurement period , according to a report from DappRadar.

Still, there is potentially some turbulence as OpenSea needs to remain competitive and market leader Blur needs to be sustainable, according to Sara Gherghelas, a blockchain analyst from DappRadar. Gherghelas said Blur’s approach of giving away rewards in its native cryptocurrency without cutting off its massive trading volume could kill it in the water, unless they have something going on.

“I think they just want their name out there,” she said. “Then they want to produce something, they want to launch a new tool.”

As a plus for those on the side of royalties, Gherghelas said Art Blocks, which launched its royalty enforcement marketplace about two weeks ago, has a high level of users interested in art for art’s sake.

In the past six months, Art Blocks surpassed two popular Yuga Labs collections, Bored Ape Yacht Club and Crypto Punks, in number of sales and number of unique traders, Gherghelas said. While BAYC and CryptoPunks had 4,922 and 2,409 sales respectively during that period, Art blocks had 39,363, albeit at lower average prices. With 15,345 unique traders, Art Blocks reduced the number of traders who interacted with the two Yuga Collections combined by more than 11,000 people.

As for the eventual winner of the royalties argument, no one quite knows the answer. Although among those gathering in New York City this week for the NFT.NYC conference, pro-royalty voices could be even louder, which would be just fine with Wiederrecht.

“If it’s royalties, it gives me a chance to sit back, be more deliberate with my work, be more careful with it and think about it before I release something,” she said. “It also gives me more time to make these projects better.”