In recent months, a debate has broken out within the NFT community surrounding creator royalties. Proponents of the feature argue that it is crucial for helping Web3 attract, and retain, top creators/teams.
Meanwhile, critics have argued that royalties have become an unnecessary tax on NFT traders and can even enrich nefarious teams that have abandoned their projects.
This debate reached fever pitch this past weekend when DeGods, a top collection on Solana, announced that it would be lowering its royalties to 0%.
It seems that both sides are caught up in a zero-sum debate, however consider this:
What if there was a new model that could align the incentives of both NFT teams and communities?
That was the question Infinity NFT marketplace founder Adi Kancherla found himself asking for the past year. And he believes that he has finally found the solution, a new feature which he calls ‘curation’.
Here’s how it works:
If a user believes strongly in an NFT collection, they can place votes for that collection on the Infinity platform via the $INFT token.
The top voted collections are then highlighted on the Infinity home page, which helps new collectors to discover them.
Lastly, users who curated a collection receive a proportional % of all the trading fees on that collection, based on the % of the total votes they have placed.
The beauty of this model is that it aligns NFT communities with collections. By earning a % of all trading fees, communities are incentivized to put skin in the game, and raise awareness for their favorite collections.
Meanwhile, NFT collections benefit from increased awareness, and can also benefit directly by also voting for their own collections.
In a world in which top NFT marketplaces like OpenSea, can put their thumb on the scale to influence which collections are highlighted on their homepage, the curation model represents a more decentralized approach.
With NFT trading volumes at their lowest in over a year, the curation feature has the potential to be the spark needed to reignite the market.
On top of the curation feature, Kancherla, who previously worked as a Software Engineer at Google and joined the Binance accelerator in 2019, had the following to say:
“We’ve spent the past 6 months in closed Beta building out one of the most advanced order books in the market. In addition, we want to be a rewarding NFT marketplace for traders, which we are accomplishing with generous trading rewards and a $1 million initial raffle.”
This post is commissioned by Infinity and does not serve as a testimonial or endorsement by The Block. This post is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment, tax, legal or other advice. You should conduct your own research and consult independent counsel and advisors on the matters discussed within this post. Past performance of any asset is not indicative of future results.
© 2022 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.
