Yuga Labs founders suggest upholding NFT royalties for new smart contracts via allowlist

Quick Take

  • The Yuga Labs co-founders suggested maintaining an allowlist of marketplaces upholding NFT royalties for new NFT smart contracts. 
  • Yuga Labs’s Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT collection has brought in the most royalties out of any NFT project. 

Wylie Aronow and the other co-founders of Yuga Labs have suggested a way for upholding NFT royalties for new smart contracts.

They suggest doing this through an allowlist which would check the wallet address and contracts known to respect royalties, as detailed in a Substack post. If it’s a normal wallet, or externally owned accounts, the transaction would automatically go through since it’s impossible to tell whether someone’s harmlessly swapping an NFT between their wallets or attempting a trade that bypasses royalties such as through wrapping. And if the allowlist detects a transaction request from the smart contract of an NFT marketplace that respects royalties, the transaction will occur.

Bored Ape Yacht Club has received a total of $147.6 million through NFT royalties so far — the most of any collection, according to a Galaxy Digital report. Implementing an allowlist helps Yuga Labs keep this recurring revenue while forgoing a deny list, or blocking certain wallet addresses, of NFT marketplaces that don’t uphold royalties that other NFT projects have done.

One example of a deny list was with QQL Mint Pass, an NFT project co-founded by Fidenza’s Tyler Hobbs, where coding in the QQL smart contract blocked the wallet address of X2Y2, an NFT marketplace that makes paying royalties optional. 

The Yuga Labs co-founders considered curating a deny list, but thought “using a deny list would inevitably result in a game of whack-a-mole, where new marketplaces would get deployed continuously to avoid paying creator fees,” Aronow wrote. 

Bored Ape Yacht Club maintains a floor price of around 60 ETH (almost $93,000), according to The Block’s Data Dashboard. If the project keeps earning its standard 2.5% of royalties upon each sale, Yuga Labs stands to earn a minimum of $2,344 worth of ETH per transaction.

Correction: This story has corrected details of how Yuga Labs's proposed allowlist would work.


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About Author

MK Manoylov has been a reporter for The Block since 2020 — joining just before bitcoin surpassed $20,000 for the first time. Since then, MK has written nearly 1,000 articles for the publication, covering any and all crypto news but with a penchant toward NFT, metaverse, web3 gaming, funding, crime, hack and crypto ecosystem stories. MK holds a graduate degree from New York University's Science, Health and Environmental Reporting Program (SHERP) and has also covered health topics for WebMD and Insider. You can follow MK on X @MManoylov and on LinkedIn.

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