Yuga Labs and Magic Eden team up to debut Ethereum NFT marketplace committed to enforcing creator royalties

Yuga Labs, the company behind NFT collections such as Bored Ape Yacht Club and CryptoPunks, has partnered with multi-chain marketplace Magic Eden to launch a new Ethereum NFT marketplace that contractually enforces creator royalties on all trades. The marketplace, first announced with a target launch by the end of 2023 and since brought live, is designed so that royalties—typically between 2.5% and 10%—cannot be bypassed at the smart contract level. This makes it one of the first major Ethereum NFT marketplaces explicitly built around mandatory royalty enforcement for all supported collections. The collaboration is a direct response to the broader NFT market’s move toward optional or zero royalties, which had sparked a “race to the bottom” as marketplaces competed on lower fees at the expense of creators’ income. Magic Eden is implementing new smart contracts that any project can use to mint collections with enforced royalties and that other marketplaces can optionally adopt, aiming to establish a shared technical standard for on-chain royalty protection. Yuga Labs has stated it will only support or collaborate with marketplaces that respect creator royalties at the protocol level, signaling a strategic attempt by one of the sector’s most influential IP holders to push the ecosystem back toward sustainable, creator-friendly economics. The move matters because it tests whether major brands and marketplaces can shift market norms back toward guaranteed creator revenue in a competitive environment where many platforms have removed or reduced royalties. By tying access to high-profile collections and future benefits to marketplaces that enforce royalties, Yuga and Magic Eden are effectively using their market power to try to set a new de facto standard for NFT trading infrastructure. If widely adopted, this approach could strengthen long-term incentives for artists and developers in Web3, but it also raises ongoing debates about how far “decentralized” markets should go in enforcing economic rules through code and gatekeeping access across platforms.

✨ AI-generated background, compiled from web sources — not editorial content.

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