Opensea Goes Zero Fees For ‘A Limited Time’

‍OpenSea has just announced that it is temporarily removing its marketplace fee, intensifying competition with upstart rival no-fee marketplace Blur.

In a tweet, OpenSea said that it will remove all marketplace fees for "a limited time" and set any collections made without on-chain royalty enforcement to default to optional creator royalties starting at 0.5%.

The marketplace has also updated its blocklist of other marketplaces that do not honor full royalty payments to authors, enabling sales on NFT marketplaces that follow the same principles. This includes Blur "as they make good on their promise," no longer requiring authors to choose between the two platforms in order to receive full royalties on their collections.

“This is the start of a new era for OpenSea,” the marketplace tweeted. “We’re excited to test this model and find the right balance of incentives and motivations for all ecosystem participants – creators, collectors, and power buyers and sellers.”

With the introduction of Blur's native token on Tuesday, tensions between Blur and OpenSea have risen this week. Blur's trade volume surpassed OpenSea for the first time since its launch in October on Wednesday.

Blur airdropped its BLUR token to over 100,000 NFT traders on Tuesday and then urged NFT project creators to block OpenSea trades on Wednesday.

Late last year, OpenSea made a number of adjustments to its creator royalties policy before announcing that it would honor all NFT projects created prior to a specific date in January 2023's full royalty settings, but would only enforce royalties moving forward for new projects that made use of an on-chain enforcement tool.

Blur is among the markets that are blocked by OpenSea's enforcement tool for not completely enforcing creator royalty settings. Nevertheless, it appears that Blur was able to bypass that blocklist in January, which has only assisted it in losing more and more users in recent weeks.

According to reports, Blur discovered a loophole in this tool in January that allowed collections that imposed royalties on OpenSea to maintain their percentages on Blur. In a blog post published on Wednesday and addressed to NFT artists, Blur outlined the differences in royalty payment options between its platform and OpenSea. It also urged users to blocklist OpenSea so that creators could get their full royalties on Blur's platform.