Citing “a massive shift in the NFT ecosystem,” prime NFT marketplace OpenSea has announced some “big changes.” As competition stiffens with the rival Blur, OpenSea has temporarily eliminated its 2.5% sales fee. OpenSea’s creator royalty fee has also been cut down. The new OpenSea fee structure involves a 0% fee for a limited time.

Announcing the updates, OpenSea tweeted:

We’re making some big changes today:
1) OpenSea fee → 0% for a limited time
2) Moving to optional creator earnings (0.5% min) for all collections without on-chain enforcement (old & new)
3) Marketplaces with the same policies will not be blocked by the operator filter

— OpenSea (@opensea) February 17, 2023

An optional 0.5% (minimum) creator earnings element for all collections is also added with no mandating on-chain enforcement (old and new). Generally, a creator royalty is 5% to 10% of the sale price. Paid to the NFT creator, the creator royalty allows NFT projects to sustainably reap revenue after the initial token sale.

Marketplaces that have identical policies shall reportedly “not be blocked by the operator filter.” The concerned “big changes” from OpenSea emanate from a rapid success streak of Blur, an NFT marketplace. Over 100,000 NFT traders were recently airdropped the BLUR token.

Blur has also reportedly advised NFT project creators to block OpenSea trades. There is reportedly no marketplace fee for traders charged by Blur. OpenSea claims a “meaningful volume and users move to NFT marketplaces that don’t fully enforce creator earnings.”

OpenSea also claims it “worked to defend creator earnings on ALL collections when others didn’t.” The NFT marketplace cites its “Operator Filter” was launched with a

belief that on-chain enforcement was the best way for creators to secure their revenue stream from the ongoing resale of their work.

OpenSea anticipated to “catalyze widespread enforcement of creator earnings” with the expectation that others would launch “more resilient solutions.” But they didn’t, per OpenSea. OpenSea reportedly claims the decision to “roll back creator earnings (even on filtered collections)” of Blur testifies OpenSea’s attempts turned futile.

Blur is also reportedly enforcing a false choice on its creators in regards to “liquidity on Blur or OpenSea,” claims OpenSea.

OpenSea also shared a finding by Dune, stating, 80% of total ecosystem volume does not pay full creator earnings, and the majority of volume (even accounting for inorganic activity) has moved to a zero-fee environment.