OpenSea halts trading on Rihanna Music NFTs

As the internet recovers from Rihanna’s red-hot Super Bowl performance, NFT fans are frustrated by OpenSea’s decision to halt secondary sales of the NFT collection for her song “Bitch Better Have My Money.”

Last week, Web3 music platform AnotherBlock split 0.99% of the total royalties to the song over 300 Ethereum NFTs. One of the song’s producers, Jamil “Deputy” Pierre, co-produced the Rihanna song in 2015 and brought a percentage of his royalties to the blockchain. It is unclear to what extent Rihanna herself is aware of the collection’s existence.

The NFT collection — which gives holders of those NFTs a percentage of future streaming royalties from the master recording — quickly sold out last week, generating $63,000 in revenue. But just two days later, a day before Rihanna’s Super Bowl performance, AnotherBlock CEO Michel “bigmich” Traore reported in the project’s Discord server that users could no longer trade the NFTs on OpenSea, by far the largest NFT trading platform by volume .

On Sunday, the AnotherBlock team said OpenSea’s automated system had “flagged” the project’s description and removed the project without notifying the team. AnotherBlock also said it was unclear why the project was flagged.

“We’ve used the same or similar language before,” AnotherBlock said of the project’s description in a Discord post.

On Tuesday, AnotherBlock’s head of community and growth Andreas “bigleton” Bigert pasted a response from OpenSea on Discord, explaining that the collection’s sale was halted on the marketplace because OpenSea does not allow NFTs that “appear to be promising shared ownership and future profit-based on that ownership.”

Bigert also claimed that OpenSea has “ignored” AnotherBlock’s attempts to resolve the issue.

“We have also addressed why similar gatherings (Royal.io and Corite for example) are still tradable on their platform in our communication without getting any comment on that either, Bigert said on Tuesday. Royal.io is a music rights NFT platform launched by electronic musician and entrepreneur Justin “3LAU” Blau, and Corite is another music platform that offers artists revenue sharing with fans and NFTs which gives holders an allocation of their original token.

In AnotherBlock’s Discord server, members were reminded that the Rihanna NFTs could still be traded on AnotherBlock’s own marketplace as well as on Obscuritywhich on Tuesday released its long-awaited airdrop rewards for the pleasure of wash traders across the NFT area.

But holders have since raised concerns about OpenSea’s restrictions affecting the pool’s “floor price”, which is the minimum purchase price for an NFT in a given pool.

“Our AnotherBlock traffic is not sufficient,” claimed one holder, kyo1984, in Discord. “Our floor prices and transactions are going down.”

According to AnotherBlock’s marketplace, the collection’s current floor price is 0.55 ETH ($867) at the time of writing, a 330% increase from its new price of 0.128 ETH, which was $210 at the time. Since launch, the collection has had just over 155 ETH (roughly $245,000) in total traded volume.

OpenSea has not yet responded Decryptits request for comment.