Skip to main content

LooksRare Offers Zero Royalty Trading, Shares Protocol Fees With Creators Instead

Zero Royalties and Still Supporting Creators

Big changes to the way you trade and support creators have come to LooksRare.

Buy and Sell NFTs for Free, While Still Supporting the Creators You Love

TLDR: Starting today, LooksRare will no longer support creator royalties by default, and instead share 25% of the LooksRare Protocol fee with creators/collection owners.

The Trading Rewards distribution ratio has also been updated to favor sellers, with the aim to achieve 0% seller fees through what is basically a rebate on protocol fees paid.

Here’s a quick summary of the changes, followed by more detailed explanations further below:

  • 🆕 Royalties: LooksRare will be directing 25% of protocol fees to creators, and removing standard creator royalties. Buyers can opt-in to pay optional royalties at checkout.

  • 🆕 Protocol Fees: Still 2% total, except now 1.5% of each trade goes to LOOKS stakers and 0.5% goes to collections if they’ve set up a receiving address. (If they haven’t, total fees are only 1.5%)

  • 🆕 Trading Rewards: 95% of trading rewards go to sellers, and 5% to buyers.

  • 🆕 Listing Rewards: The Listing Rewards leaderboard now ranks by OpenSea rolling 24 hour volume only.

Background: Why Change?

The growth of zero-royalty marketplaces has eroded the general willingness to pay royalties throughout the NFT space. Good news for traders, but with a big downside: the move away from royalties has removed an important source of passive income for most creators.

That’s why we’re choosing to lead the charge in this new landscape, by creating a competitive solution that still benefits creators: diverting protocol fees directly to creators.

In this update, creators/collection owners will be able to share a flat 25% of the LooksRare protocol fee. This approach allows us to offer the most favorable conditions to NFT sellers, while still supporting creators/collection owners.

Tweet Image

Yes, we said that. This update is an evolution of our previous stance, and it’s not something we’re taking lightly. The industry is trending towards zero-royalties, but it’s still our responsibility to support creators in the new landscape.

🚫 LooksRare is not the first marketplace to offer zero-royalty trading.

✅ LooksRare is the first zero-royalty marketplace to still support creators by directly sharing protocol fees.

This is a first step. You can expect more improvements in the upcoming LooksRare V2 Protocol release 👀.

What are the changes?

Changes to Royalties

  • 🆕 LooksRare will now be directing 25% of protocol fees to creators, and removing standard creator royalties.
  • Buyers can opt-in to pay optional royalties at checkout.

Creators/Collection owners that have either set up a receiving address on the LooksRare royalty registry via their collection management page or that use the EIP2981 royalty standard, will now receive a new 0.5% fee from every NFT sale on the LooksRare platform.

I’m a creator and I want royalties. Why shouldn’t I just block Zero-Royalty Marketplaces?

We fully support any artists/creators’ right to choose. You have options—QQL has released their code, for example—but do bear in mind that since new marketplace contracts are launched frequently, your blocking method should be upgradeable.

Can I still pay royalties on LooksRare if I want to?

As a buyer, yes! You can choose to pay royalties in addition to the purchase price if you wish.

As a seller, no, because now it’s the buyers who will choose to pay or not. However, bear in mind that 25% of the protocol fee paid by sellers will now go to the creators.

Here’s a mockup of the optional buyer royalties payment flow:

Optional Royalties

Changes to Trading Rewards

  • ❇️ In order to achieve close to 0% seller fees, 95% of Trading Rewards will now go to sellers, and 5% to buyers (previously 50:50).
  • 💸 With this change, the amount sellers earn in Trading Rewards will act as a rebate, and more or less offset the 2% protocol fee.

Here’s an example:

Bob buys an Azuki from Sally for 10 ETH and the total buy + sell volume for the day is 1,000 ETH.

  • Buyer Bob receives 0.1% (1/1000) of the daily trading rewards amount
  • Seller Sally receives 1.9% (19/1000) of the daily trading rewards amount

The new distribution ratio will be in effect from the Trading Rewards calculation period starting 9:00 AM (UTC) on October 28th, 2022

Changes to Listing Rewards

  • 🆕 The Listing Rewards leaderboard now ranks by OpenSea rolling 24-hour volume only.

With the removal of royalties, the cost to climb up the LOOKS Listing Rewards leaderboard becomes the same for all verified collections on LooksRare. As such, we need to prevent collections from gaming Listing Rewards by artificially increasing their volume. Here’s how:

The Listing Rewards leaderboard will now be ranked solely on OpenSea-based volume.

This means the volume on LooksRare won’t be considered for the current leaderboard calculation of LR + OS volume. In effect until further notice.

Q&A

Traders

Does this affect any of my existing listings?

Yes. For listings that were made before the change:

  • Listings will still be valid and can be purchased as usual.
  • The total fee you’ll pay for existing listings will be 2.5% instead of the new total of 2.0%. This is because the existing listings were made when the protocol fee was set at 2.0%, so adding the new 0.5% to creators gives 2.5%.
  • However, royalties will be removed from those existing listings.

You are free to cancel and relist your previous listings and use the new strategy to pay a 2.0% fee instead.

Creator/Collection Owners

I set up royalties on LooksRare already, do I need to do it again?

Nope, you’re all set. Your 25% share of the LooksRare protocol fee will go to the receiver address you set, each time one of your creations is sold on LooksRare.

How does the new system work for EIP-2981?

If your contract follows the EIP-2981 standard, LooksRare will automatically use the Receiver address indicated in the contract. This is the address you’ll receive the proceeds to. Just as before the change, if you want to change your Receiver address, you’ll need to adjust it in your contract.

Aggregators/Developers

There are two new strategies, along with the depreciation of their existing counterparts

Please, update the respective contracts and routing in order to support the change within two weeks.

New:

Deprecated (the timeline for full deprecation is 2 weeks):

There is also an update to the minPercentageToAsk calculation

If creating an order with the new strategy the minPercentageToAsk should be 9800.

10000 - (protocol fee (150) + rebate (50))

While you shouldn't be creating orders with the deprecated strategies, just for reference, the minPercentageToAsk should be 9750.

10000 - (protocol fee (200) + rebate (50))

If you’re currently distributing LOOKS trading rewards to users of your platform

You need to update the ratio of rewards given to buyers and sellers to 5/95 respectively.

Order TypeOLDNEW
Maker Bid50%5%
Taker Bid50%5%
Maker Ask50%95%
Taker Ask50%95%

Zodd
Guts