While NFT royalties are one of the technology’s biggest selling points, they’re not as straightforward as they seem. Complicating matters is the fact that as it stands, NFT royalties are not natively cross-market compatible. This means that even though you may have set up royalties on one marketplace for your NFT creation if it sells elsewhere you won’t automatically get a cut sent your way.
Fortunately, the popular NFT marketplace, Rarible, is helping to bridge this gap and offers a robust and comprehensive royalty system that even has some cross-market capabilities. Understanding Rarible royalties are important for NFT creators as well as buyers. Knowing how much of the sale will be taken as a royalty is something that often catches people unawares.
In this guide, we’ll be discussing what Rarible’s royalty structure is and how it works. We’ll explain how to set up royalties using the marketplace and also how to claim royalties for collections made on other platforms.
Rarible Royalties Explained
Royalty systems differ across marketplaces. Rarible’s own implementation makes use of smart contracts and collects a percentage of secondary sales to give back to the original creator. This percentage is decided by the creator and has no upper limit.
In simple terms, if you create an NFT with rarible, you can use computer code to ensure you receive money from all future sales. This is the case whether it’s the second sale, third, or twentieth.
The royalty system encourages quality content creation by creators in order to reap future rewards. It also encourages the building of reputation, and promotion of NFTs by holders to increase the value of their own purchases.
The percentage cut is up to the creator. Should they wish, they could even implement a 50% royalty on an NFT. It should be noted, however, that NFTs with high royalty figures can put off some traders. As these are some of the NFT space’s most active buyers, a lot of creators choose royalties of 10% or lower.
Rarible royalty differences
Rarible royalties can be set for individual NFTs, as well as collections. This fine-grained control of royalties is a little different from other marketplaces such as OpenSea. There, creators will set the royalty structure for entire NFT collections but are unable to pick out specific tokens and dictate separate percentage cuts.
Rarible also has no upper limit on royalty percentages. While it is rare for creators to choose a royalty fee higher than 10%, the platform has chosen to remain neutral in this regard and let the market decide for itself what is a reasonable rate.
How do Rarible royalties work?
Rarible uses on-chain smart contracts to track royalty rights and to ensure funds are transferred appropriately.
A smart contract is a piece of computer code that is stored on a blockchain, such as Ethereum (https://ethereum.org/en/). They are described as “self-executing” as they will automatically run when certain conditions are met.
In the case of Rarible royalties, these conditions will be a secondary sale of an NFT using the Rarible marketplace. If a sale is made, the code will automatically ensure that the royalty fee is sent their way without the need for manually tracking what is owed to who.
E.g. Jane turns her digital art into an NFT using Rarible’s minting tools. She states she wants a 10% royalty fee to be used for future sales. She sells her NFT for 2 ETH. One year later, the buyer then sells it on to someone else for 10 ETH. Given that Jane has a 10% royalty payment implemented, she can expect to receive around 1 ETH after fees.
This is far different from the traditional art market. There, once an artist makes the original sale, they essentially relinquish all ownership of that piece and very rarely receive any royalties for their work.
The only exception is the music industry where royalties are collected, but far less efficiently than how NFT royalties are through smart contracts.
Setting Rarible royalties
To set royalties with Rarible couldn’t be easier and is as simple as adding a figure into a text field at the appropriate time when minting a token.
- Click create and choose which blockchain you would like to mint your NFT on.
- Choose whether you are creating a single or multiple editions.
- Upload your file (under 100 MB in size and either GIF, PNG, WEBP, MP4, or MP3).
- Choose or create your collection to sort your NFT.
- Fill out the title and description.
- Choose sale type.
- Set your royalty structure. This is where you will decide what percentage of future sales you wish to receive. Remember, you can put any percentage in that you like but anything above 10% is likely to raise eyebrows.
- Complete minting by selecting your minting fee method and then “Create items.”
Alternatively, if you already have a collection or NFT minted, look for the three dots on the token’s tile preview or underneath the collection’s description. This will give you the option to “Set royalties.”
Collect royalties from non-Rarible collections
One of the killer features of Rarible is the ability to establish ownership of collections created using other marketplaces. Once verified, Rarible will then allow royalties to be collected from sales made using their own marketplace too.
To connect an external collection to Rarible, just do the following:
- On a desktop computer, sign in to Rarible with a wallet established on the blockchain as the owner of the collection. This will have been dictated by the collection’s smart contract upon creation.
- Using the search box at the top of Rarible’s website, search for your collection using the name, abbreviation, or collection address.
- Once found, look under the collection’s description. Click the three dots and select “Claim Ownership.”
- If the wallet you used to sign in with is associated with the collection, upon clicking the three dots again, you should be able to select “Set royalties.”
- A pop-up will then appear where you can set a percentage of royalties for all parties involved in the creation of the collection.
- Click “Update royalties” to save your changes.
Takeaway
Rarible has one of the most comprehensive royalty systems out of any NFT marketplace. With the ability to also claim ownership of collections made on other platforms, creators do not need to worry that they’re missing out on potential revenue for sales made here.
While the current royalty structure Rarible uses is well-considered things could change however with the future implementation of EIP-2981 (https://eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-2981 and innovations such as EIP-4910 (https://blog.treetrunk.io/treetrunk-completes-new-nft-draft-standard-eip-4910/). These will allow cross-platform collection of royalties with even less hassle.
