OpenSea Royalties

The problem

OpenSea and potentially other NFT aggregators may not pay out royalties to creators when minted on platforms like KnownOrigin, this is often due to a technical limitation in the way they pay out fees, typically restricting payments to a single address, this clearly does not work when we have 4000+ creators.

Other problems exist such as non-atomic post sale settlement, the custodial nature of handling funds, ideally royalties should be handled at the time of sale but these things take time and effort to solve properly, it's an ecosystem wide challenge.

When items are bought and sold on KnownOrigin itself, we correctly adhere to our contracts rules and correctly payout royalties to any artist or collective.

This unfortunately cannot be guaranteed for all other platforms. In response to this problem we have built a few things:

1. Support for ERC-2981 - when this is widely adopted any marketplace can easily pay out to the original creators. Read a blog we wrote on this subject here. We also support the Rarible royalties standard which should also mean royalties are payout to the creators. The real solution is ERC-2981 in our opinion

2. An open-source royalties' distributor - this allows OpenSea to send any royalties captured to a single address. We can then we can generate a set of merkle proofs based on the OpenSea API, in essence running an off-chain reconciliation process in a non-custodial, public and verifiable way. Although the KO team is running this process there is a clear path to decentralisation which is key to this solution.

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See the code

GitHub: merkle-royalties-distributor

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Deployed Midnight UTC, 23rd September 2021

All items listed from this point should capture royalties payments on OpenSea

Merkle based royalties distributor

How it works

Periodically OpenSea payout royalties, this is based on their own rules and is out of our control when this happens.

When a payout occurs, we see the event and then run the reconciliation script, publish the results IPFS and update the smart contract with a merkle tree that contains everyone's due balances.

This appears to happen every 1-2 weeks

Claimants can then check their profile and draw down any funds which have accrued from OpenSea.

Claimants can also let royalties build up over time and then only draw down when they have enough to justify any GAS costs.

Flow diagram of how it works

Merkle based royalties distributor

See the code: merkle-royalties-distributor

This code is open-source and can be used by any project!