Since our inception in 2018, KnownOrigin has championed fair compensation for creators, ensuring that perpetual royalties were paid on the resale of work. Our commitment to this led to Co-founder, James Morgan playing a pivotal role in advancing this within the Web3 ecosystem by co-authoring EIP-2981,which was designed to ensure that NFT creators receive a transparent and efficient means to claim their fair share of royalties from the sale of their creations, even if they are resold multiple times.
In September 2021, we advanced this further by introducing the KnownOrigin Vault, a triple-lock royalty solution that provides creators with a streamlined way to claim earned royalties from their NFTs sold on other platforms. To date, since the creation of the Vault, KnownOrigin has captured over $750,000 worth of royalties for creators. With these initiatives, KnownOrigin continues to lead the way in supporting and empowering NFT creators.
Over the past few months, the issue of royalties for creators has gained increasing attention in the industry. Unfortunately, some platforms have disrupted the relationship between buyers, sellers, and marketplaces by changing their approach to royalty payments. As a result, the amount of secondary royalties captured on other marketplaces and redirected to the KnownOrigin vault has significantly declined With declining use of the Vault service, and the significant resources required to run the service, we’ve made the difficult decision to wind down the Vault Service, effective from today.
Creators will continue to be able to access the service and claim existing funds in the Vault, but as of 12th of May 2023 we will no longer capture any new royalties.
We appreciate that you may have some questions regarding this. Please feel free to reach out with your questions by submitting a support ticket in our Help Centre.
What is KnownOrigin's current position in the royalty ecosystem?
In September 2021, our team introduced the Vault, a triple-lock royalty solution comprised of three parts:
ERC-2981: a non-enforceable royalty standard co-authored by James Morgan, co-founder of KnownOrigin. This standard defines a set of functions that can be implemented by NFT contracts to allow for the payment of royalties to the original creator of an NFT whenever that NFT is resold on a secondary market.
Royalties Distributor: our open-source royalties distributor, which enables third-party marketplaces to pay royalties to a centralised location. On a monthly basis, we then run a process that reconciles the funds, determines which creators are due royalties, and updates the Merkle tree so these can be claimed by a creator.
V3 Contract: KnownOrigin’s V3 contracts, which were launched in 2021 and fully adhere to on-chain royalty standards.
Additionally, In March we submitted older KnownOrigin contracts which don't conform to EIP2981 to the royalties registry, this is now used by some marketplaces (Such as Coinbase NFT) to look up royalty amounts and addresses on chain so that developers can backport older contracts.
What changed?
With industry changes to royalty payments and some marketplaces no longer honouring royalties, this has led to a significant drop in payments being directed to KnownOrigin’s Vault. With declining use of the Vault service, and the significant resources required to run the service, we’ve made the difficult decision to wind-down the Vault Service, effective from today.
What’s Next?
We encourage all creators to log into their profiles on KnownOrigin and claim any outstanding unclaimed royalties in the Vault. While creators will continue to have access to existing royalties in the Vault, as we wind down the solution on 12th of May 2023, no new royalties will be captured after this date. We appreciate your understanding and continued support as we work to provide you with the best possible tools and features to succeed in the Web3 space.
We appreciate that you may have some questions regarding this. Please feel free to reach out with your questions by submitting a support ticket through the Help button.
Our On-Going Commitment to Empowering Creators
At KnownOrigin, building trust on our platform is a top priority. We understand the importance of self-sovereign ownership of creative works and want to empower our creators with the necessary tools to achieve this. That's why we've developed our Creator Contracts feature, which through our simple, no-code solution allows creators to deploy their own self-sovereign contract, set their own royalty fee and choose which marketplaces can trade their assets. In addition, we're constantly developing new tools to help creators increase their visibility, take ownership of their work, and capture more royalties. We believe that these efforts will help ensure that creators are fairly compensated for their hard work and contribution to the ecosystem.