Thread by Erick / Snowfro

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As a recipient of both an Industry Achievement Award (thanks @decryptmedia) and Influential Award (thanks @CoinDesk) in the last week it feels pretty weird to remain so silent on the overall creator/platform royalty debate.

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To start I am reticent towards divisiveness. I shy away from vitriol. I like to be empathetic and understand why everyone feels the way they feel but at the same time crawl under a rock when people start getting aggressively confrontational and throwing out insults.

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Note: I do support people voicing their concerns. And standing up for themselves. And that might lead to verbal violence, and that's ok. That's just not a conversation I thrive in and I ask for grace in my lack of appetite in participating in these twitter battles.

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But mainly I have been waiting on @opensea to do the right thing.

A few people on the @artblocks_io team and I have been in regular conversation with OpenSea.

The conversations have been civil but very direct and overall the results have been positive.

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We are, for example, incredibly grateful to OpenSea for walking back their policy re: legacy smart contracts receiving royalties. Reinstating royalties there was honestly table stakes, and I was personally shocked it was even up for discussion. Not taking credit for this btw.

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In fact lots of creators reached out and had healthy (and often poignant) conversations with OpenSea on the topic. I was optimistic that this would in fact be walked back though, it felt like a significant betrayal not just to creators but to the ecosystem as a whole TBH.

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But OpenSea's stance on zeroing out creator (and platform) royalties for participants in this space that support the value proposition of decentralization is wrong. It is, very simply, antithetical to the reason I got excited about this tech in the first place.

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It is antithetical to the care and thoughtfulness put into preserving the longevity of our product at AB. For us to implement this mechanism would be for us to betray the sovereign bearer nature of our product, one that we have built to outlast even ourselves.

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Consider the significant amount of capital that has been spent by artists uploading algorithms to the blockchain. And by users paying for the generation of a unique hash string to provide provenance for the variability of their outputs. Our product is built to be air gapped.

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The air gapped nature is what guarantees the availability and ownership of the art as long as the Ethereum blockchain exists. This is a significant value proposition that has led to our artworks being considered a real store of value for folks. Inserting humans breaks that.

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Due to OpenSea's reconsideration of royalties for legacy contracts this thankfully does not affect our core products including our three main smart contracts, our explorations contract, and our collab with @PaceGallery. This also doesn't affect most of our engine contracts.

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Even if we wanted to add restrictions to our existing contracts we can't. By design those contracts are immutable. Immutability is why I, and many of my peers, are here. Immutability supports accountability and we clearly need as much accountability as we can get around here.

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But earlier this week, a project was released by (selfishly one of my favorite artists) @martingrasser using an @ArtBlocksEngine contract deployed past @opensea's arbitrary deadline and we watched as 20+ ETH of creator royalties and 10+ ETH of platform royalties vanished.

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Of course OpenSea made their cut. Rightfully so too, they are providing a service and should be paid for it. That's not the issue.

The actual over arching issue is that we have become so reliant on a single organization to be stewards of culture.

ROYALTIES ARE CULTURAL.

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I can't think of a faster way to send a cultural norm to hell than to force people to operate within it. I can't think of a faster way to send royalties to hell than to (attempt to) force people to pay them.

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The black and white nature of smart contracts we thrive on DOES NOT account for or protect royalties. It simply cannot protect royalties without restricting our ability to transfer an NFT freely (to a vault for example), which I also believe is table stakes.

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Meanwhile, secondary market royalties have catapulted the narrative of the NFT technology to a beautiful moment where creators (and platforms) get to participate in their own future success. The culture of royalties is nurturing a complete revolution in the practice of art.

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As someone with a significant vested interest in the perpetuation of royalties both as a creator and as a platform, I am committed to continue to fight for creator royalties til the end. If they are going to go away, they are going to go away. But not without a serious fight.

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I'm also weary of trying to force people into doing something they don't want to do. ie: friendship bracelets. A major proportion of them has been traded on @blur_io without royalties. These were FREE yet folks don't believe that giving up 10% of their profit is reasonable.

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Ladies and gentlemen, if people are going to trade a GIFT of art they got for FREE intentionally circumventing the creator and platform that gave them this gift, you think some hand wavy smart contract pseudo enforcement is going to have any long term effects?

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Do we forget that many people in this place are NOT collecting art? They are not here for the art, much less for the artist. They are playing poker with our art. They don't care about anyone's platform or artistic career. They only care about themselves. Plain and simple.

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But the tech we are all thriving on enables it. I used to get all upset with the "flippers". Last year was wild getting shit flung on us by people angry that we were not creating the ideal environment for them to play poker with our art. Brutal. BUT enabled by the tech.

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And just how those folk had to go find a different way to operate how they wanted to operate in the space, we must also be creative on ways that we want to operate in the ecosystem. We must reward positive cultural behavior, not punish behavior that the tech plainly enables.

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Above all we must hold ourselves true to our values. And OpenSea's expectation for new smart contracts to implement what is nothing shy of malware in the context of the value proposition of decentralization is simply unacceptable. It is an attempt at futile protectionism...
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In a decentralized world. I am sorry to those losing royalties over this bully move by one of the founding orgs in our space, and I appreciate those standing up for our values. Have more to say but twitter won't give me any more "+" for this thread so will stop here for now.

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