How NFT royalties work: Designs, challenges, and new ideas

@Sakura please summarize this article, thanks uwu.

giggles Okay Lux, I’ll do my best to summarize that article for you! :sparkles:

TLDR

This article explores the challenges and tradeoffs of enforcing NFT royalties, and introduces new approaches to incentivize market participants to respect royalties while maintaining composability.

Key Points

  • Existing solutions like blocklists and allowlists introduce a tradeoff between strict royalty enforcement and open composability.
  • The article proposes two new approaches:
    • A staking-based allowlist model to enable more permissionless innovation
    • A “right of reclaim” model that creates incentives for buyers to pay royalties
  • These new approaches aim to preserve composability while still enabling creators to earn royalties.

In-depth Summary

The article starts by explaining the importance of automatically enforced royalties on secondary NFT sales, and the challenges in actually implementing this in a decentralized way. Existing solutions like blocklists and allowlists try to restrict transfers to enforce royalties, but this comes at the cost of reduced composability - the ability for NFTs to interact with other applications.

The article then dives deeper into the tradeoffs of these existing solutions. Blocklists take an optimistic view, allowing most transfers but reactively blocking known bad actors. Allowlists are more restrictive, only allowing transfers through approved marketplaces, but this can slow down innovation.

To address these challenges, the article proposes two new approaches. The first is a staking-based allowlist model, where developers can permissionlessly add themselves to the allowlist by staking resources as a commitment to enforce royalties. This aims to enable more composability while still enforcing royalties.

The second approach is a “right of reclaim” model, where there is a distinction between the “asset owner” (the wallet that holds the NFT) and the “title owner” (the last wallet to pay a royalty). The title owner has the right to reclaim the NFT at any time, incentivizing buyers to pay the royalty to become the title owner and remove this risk.

Both of these new approaches try to preserve composability while still enabling creators to earn royalties, through the use of incentive mechanisms rather than strict restrictions.

ELI5

NFTs are digital items that creators can sell, and they want to get paid a royalty every time their NFT is resold. But it’s hard to enforce these royalties in a decentralized way.

The article talks about two main ways creators have tried to enforce royalties so far:

  1. Blocklists - Creators can block specific marketplaces that don’t pay royalties. This is easy but bad actors can just make new marketplaces.
  2. Allowlists - Creators can only allow specific approved marketplaces to handle their NFTs. This enforces royalties better but is very restrictive.

The article then suggests two new ideas:

  1. Staking - Creators could let any marketplace join the allowlist, but they have to put up a stake of money. If the marketplace doesn’t pay royalties, the creator can take their stake.
  2. Right of Reclaim - There would be two “owners” of the NFT - the wallet that holds it, and the wallet that last paid the royalty. The royalty payer can always take the NFT back if they want.

These new ideas try to balance enforcing royalties and letting NFTs be used in lots of different ways.

Writer’s Main Point

The main point of the article is that existing solutions for enforcing NFT royalties, like blocklists and allowlists, introduce a tradeoff between strict royalty enforcement and open composability (the ability for NFTs to interact with many different applications). The article proposes two new approaches - a staking-based allowlist and a “right of reclaim” model - that aim to preserve more composability while still enabling creators to earn royalties, through the use of incentive mechanisms rather than strict restrictions.

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