• OpenSea will stop enforcing its Operator Filter and instead let buyers decide whether or not to pay the original creator of an NFT.
• This change is happening because “the ecosystem did not adopt the Operator Filter” OpenSea says.
• The marketplace says it is investigating alternatives to the filter but there are no details on this as yet.

One of the marquee features of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) when the tech first launched was that artists could get paid for their work long after the first initial sale. This would be accomplished through creator fees, a royalty that buyers would pay that would go back to the original creator of the artwork.

However, this feature is one that more and more exchanges have left behind and now the largest NFT marketplace, OpenSea, is scrapping its Operator Filter at the end of August. This filter allowed creators and artists to limit trade of their work to platforms that enforce creator fees.

“The majority of volume continues to move to zero creator fees, a trend we’ve seen build steadily throughout this year. Since its introduction, we’ve seen several web3 marketplaces and aggregators (including Blur, Dew, and LooksRare) circumvent the Operator Filter to avoid enforcing creator fees on their platforms. The Operator Filter works by blocking certain smart contract addresses; so if marketplaces that do not enforce creator fees use the Seaport contract, then it’s technically impossible for the Operator Filter to block them without also blocking marketplaces that do enforce creator fees. This means that the solution requires uniform enforcement by everyone in the ecosystem, and is only effective as its weakest link. Unfortunately, the ecosystem did not adopt the Operator Filter,” co-founder and chief executive officer Devin Finzer wrote in a blog post.

The CEO says that some collectors and creators found the Operator Filter muddied the waters when it came to ownership of an NFT.

The removal of this feature won’t see creators with the Operator Filter enabled immediately losing their creator payments. Rather, creator fees on these collections will become optional after 29th February 2024. New collections however will have the feature disabled entirely on 31st August 2023.

What does this mean for NFT creators? That’s unclear and while OpenSea says its looking at new use cases to get creators paid, we have to wonder how much effort is being put into that. We say this because for the most part, the NFT ecosystem is a shadow of its former self. Assets are selling for cents on the dollar they were purchased at and there is a consensus among the public that this was nothing more than a grift all long.

A number of web3 projects started by large companies which included NFTs have now seen abject failure. One of those was Ubisoft which launched Quartz NFTs only to shutter the project a few months later. The items claimed by gamers on the platform reportedly sold for tens of dollars per Ars Technica, highlighting a lack of interest.

As you might imagine, the changes OpenSea is making have not gone down well in the community. Many have lamented the death of the filter but aren’t surprised and have said that this is just the latest use case of NFTs to fall apart.

The question now is what the value of an NFT is aside from lining the pocket of a cryptobro trying to convince you a low-effort JPEG is a good investment. We’re racking our brains and we’re coming up short.