NFT royalties ‘not going away on SuperRare’: Co-founder Jon Perkins

Creating royalties, or lack thereof, on NFT marketplaces has been the niche’s biggest topic of conversation lately.

For SuperRare, the decision to pay the creators was already made five years ago.

According to the project’s co-founder and CTO Jonathan Perkins, when SuperRare launched in 2018, the royalty aspect was to become a “standard”.

“We made a pretty controversial move at the time to include artist royalties. What we said is, if we can help artists make money through royalties, why not at least try? So we played a part in establishing a sort of standard, at least for the art side, he says Decrypt during the NFT Paris conference. “Royalty doesn’t go away on SuperRare.”

Creator royalties are fees ranging up to 10% of an NFT sale paid to creators. For projects that generate significant trading volume, these fees can be a significant source of revenue.

OpenSea’s controversial move to change its creator royalty and fee structure earlier this month has raised serious questions about what the value proposition for NFT marketplaces will be if artists and the original creators are cut off from revenue streams. Now marketplace buyers are free to decide whether to honor creators’ royalty preferences on the world’s leading NFT marketplace.

The decision followed news that rival marketplace Blur, which previously offered a minimum creator royalty of 0.5%, is enforcing full creator royalties for any collection that blocks trading on OpenSea, marking a new round of standoff between the two companies.

“What I think we’re seeing widely now is just the kind of chaos of a new market taking shape,” Perkins, adding that the broader NFT market isn’t all about images of monkeys and penguins.

“If you think about it in terms of Blur versus OpenSea, on OpenSea there’s certainly art, but there’s also domain names, insurance contracts, collectibles and a lot of other things that aren’t art,” he said.

More than a quick buck

He also believes that the challenges for more generalized marketplaces are much different than for SuperRare—a social network for art creators and collectors of NFTs—as “collectors on SuperRare generally aren’t doing high-frequency trading or trying to make a quick buck.”

“We’ve spent five years building a community where collectors really build connections with the artists, and there’s more goodwill and a long-term view, and that tends to make it much easier to have a consensus around preserving royalties,” Perkins said .

As for the recent trend of big companies and brands rushing into the NFT space, Perkins said this is quite natural as there is “so much surface area” and big brands are certainly aware of a new customer base and a new creator economy which appears.

“I think it’s actually a good thing for Web3 that these brands are coming in and experimenting,” Perkins said. “If I were to give any advice to companies like this, I would say ‘show up without an agenda and try to learn, try to talk to people, learn from the artist.’ I think it is possible to do things in a very authentic way.”

The wrong approach, he said, would be to try to rubber-stamp your previous approach and try to come in and do something “that’s more gimmicky or low-stakes.”

“I think society has a good bullshit detector in general,” Perkins said, adding that for the really savvy collectors with big bucks, it becomes apparent over time.