On November 5, 2022, OpenSea published a tweet announcing that they were moving to optional royalties. They did, however, give a way to enforce royalties on the platform. Their method involved changing smart contracts to block token transfers on platforms that do not have options to enforce royalties.

This project was eventually given to the Creator Ownership Research Institute (CORI), which is an cooperative effort comprised of OpenSea, Manifold, Zora, SuperRare, Foundation, and Nifty Gateway.

If you want to read more about OpenSea's reasons, you can read the tweet threads here and here, but understandably, people were very upset and the comments reflect this.

Enter BlockLists 🚀

BlockLists are smart contracts that allow creators to block marketplaces, which in turn blocks collectors from listing on blocked marketplaces. Ethically, we believe restricting token transfer functions undermine the sovereignty & ownership of digital assets, so that is why the technology only blocks people from listing on marketplaces.

In The Lab, we offer a shared CORI Compliant BlockList for creators that block major non-royalty paying marketplaces that is compliant with the list required by CORI/OpenSea. The blocked marketplaces on this list are:

Of course, we also offer the ability to turn off BlockList functionality on your contracts, if you so choose.

We plan to offer creator-owned BlockLists in the future that can be customized as creators see fit. CORI/OpenSea require that at least the following marketplaces are blocked:

If you want to create your own BlockList prior to the functionality existing in The Lab, feel free to reach out to the team!

Questions? Give us a shout! 🫡