SOLANA’S ROYALTY DEBACLE.

We’d like to kick off this month’s edition with our take on Magic Eden’s recent decision to shift away from obligatory royalties to an ‘optional’ royalty system.

The biggest NFT marketplace on the Solana blockchain has just given all NFT art buyers the option of paying no royalties to its creators. Given that no one actually wants to pay that extra percentage, most artists on the platform will now be earning no revenue from the work they likely depended on.

To highlight how important royalties are to artists: many in the space will sell their NFT art for lower prices, sometimes for free, in an attempt to create demand and secure royalties that make for a more consistent form of revenue than one-off primary sales fees.

On the surface, this sounds like a Machiavellian scheme to incentivise more sales on the platform and create more revenue for Magic Eden through fees - but it’s more complicated than that. In fact, the marketplace simultaneously announced that it was waiving all fees for the foreseeable future, in an attempt to settle nerves.

DeSo founder @nadertheory explains Magic Eden’s reasons for doing this very eloquently in his piece on the topic, so I won’t get into too much detail here. But in a nutshell: Eden were forced into this decision by the vast, royalty-voiding practice of secondary marketplace sales.

When someone purchases an NFT on Magic Eden they aren’t obliged to re-sell it there. In fact, they are sometimes strategically incentivised to sell elsewhere in a bid for further exposure and more bids, even if it means waiving royalties in the process. Nader insightfully points out that the issue lies in the fact that the Solana ecosystem is a highly competitive space unlike, for example, OpenSea on Ethereum, which essentially holds a monopoly on NFT sale transactions. This means that other marketplaces on Solana serve as attractive bidder pools, and royalties aren’t a strong enough incentive for people to ignore them.

In essence, as Nader rightly concludes, it might be impossible for any Solana-based marketplace to uphold artist royalties and remain competitive.

WHAT IT MEANS FOR US.

The reason we wanted to touch on this topic is that we have long thought about secondary marketplace sales and how they could impact the artists that design our novels - and for this reason, we’ve been given assurances from myNFT.com that royalties will be respected regardless of this concerning trend.

We entered this space from the music industry in an attempt to build and be part of a fairer future for artists, and we believe that automated, transparent royalty payouts are the bedrock of this vision.

ARCHITECT SPOTLIGHT.

On to the exciting stuff: here’s where we get to spotlight some of the remarkable homosapiens that have agreed to join the project as crypto-novel architects.

Nailah Hunter

The sonic landscapes that Los Angelist Nailah Hunter creates with her harp are dreamy and luscious. Her music is movie score -esque - unusual in structure and wonderfully experimental, but also modern and comfortable among dream-like smooth pop contemporaries.

We were drawn to her because an important part of what we’re trying to achieve with our crypto-novels is world-building - and Nailah’s music does this in a refreshingly unpretentious way. We’ve been incredibly lucky so far with the quality of Architects that have agreed to join the project, and Nailah is no exception!

She’ll be scoring an action fantasy crypto-novel about a people’s journey to harness a new energy source, with visuals from last month’s newsletter spotlight Max Mitenkov.

Maryanna Clarke

Playwright, actress, writer and theatre-maker Maryanna is no stranger to world-building. Her playwright debut ‘Six Serpents and a Tarantula’ picked up five-star reviews and a Standing Ovation nomination, which is of no surprise to us given the wonderful work she did on the Spark Verses for our debut novel series ‘The Oracle’s Verse’.

She’s also the co-founder of queer and female-led theatre company Old School Players and the co-organiser of Old School Theatre Festival in Dorset, England - the first of its kind in that area. Oh and she’s all-around wonderful to work with.

COMMUNITY.

In recent weeks, we’ve seen a significant uptick in attention towards our project and in members of our community. I would be remiss not to mention that the primary reason for this is due to our token airdrop whitelist having gone live, and the predictable knock-on effect of that resonating among portions of the web3 landscape.

However, despite the transactional nature of some early adopters - we’ve also found that the tide has brought in some smart, passionate and genuine fans of our project. Florence, our newest team member and community growth specialist, deserves a massive shoutout for her efforts on this front!

It’s still a novel experience for us to share this project with so many people. After a full year of brainstorming, learning and building, it’s now beginning to feel like an iteration of what we always wanted it to be: a vibrant community effort founded on a common passion for art, decentralisation and output.

If you want to stay updated on everything Quest of Evolution, or just want to gain an Early Member role and a potential token airdrop, join us in the Discord!

by Bob Juburi - Community & Artist Relations @ The Quest of Evolution