In this post, we give a brief rundown of the events and background surrounding the delayed Reveal originally planned for November 25, and look at some of the implications this might have for creator fees and other issues moving forward.
What happened?
On November 25, 2022 at 21:00 JST, we deployed a smart contract to reveal the Prophets, and discovered that we were unable to set the level of creator fees incurred when buying or selling a Prophet on OpenSea. This was due to a change in OpenSea’s specifications, which prevented these creator fees from being set if the first token minted after 12:00 ET on November 8 did not meet the following test — namely, whether or not tokens are prohibited from being transferred by some of the addresses specified by OpenSea.
https://github.com/ProjectOpenSea/operator-filter-registry#validation
Why was there a delay in realizing this?
The open alpha (testnet) release was on September 28, at which point creator fees could be set.
Since this particular release was based on the open alpha one, we were unable to keep up with the specification changes made by OpenSea.
This was completely an oversight on our part, and we would like to extend an apology to all our users on this front.
Why did our response take so long?
The response demanded of us was not just a matter of changing the fee parameters on OpenSea, but required a change in the smart contract implementation itself.
For a variety of reasons, we made the decision not to make our Prophet contract upgradable. This meant that we needed to deploy a new Prophet contract with a different implementation and introduce it into the Nannda ecosystem.
In addition, as several Prophets had already been revealed by the time this issue was discovered, it took some time to decide on the most appropriate course of action.
How we chose to respond
In principle, it is possible to set creator fees by ensuring that addresses registered in the OperatorFilterRegistry are not able to transfer NFT tokens.
On this occasion, Nannda chose to implement the DefaultOperatorFilterer provided by OpenSea in the Prophet’s smart contract.
What NFT projects should be aware of
- Regarding Creator Fees
There is a lot of discussion and debate surrounding creator fees on various marketplaces at the moment. Should we even have zero royalties, for example. Some projects and exchanges believe that larger and/or more stable revenue streams can be better constructed through means other than royalties, for example.
Valhalla, a popular NFT project that dropped just a few days ago, announced that it will block exchanges and marketplaces that do not pay creator fees in a move towards a multiple revenue stream model, while DeGods, an NFT project on Solana, announced that it will pay 0% royalties.
Moving forward, each project will no doubt make a different decision about this, so builders and users alike will no doubt have to keep an eye on the shifting specifications of this market.
- About creator fees on OpenSea
As of November 27, 2022, only Ethereum (mainnet) and Goerli (testnet) have made on-chain enforcement obligatory. As it has been clearly stated, however, that after January 2, 2023, similar measures will be enforced for all EVM chains supported by OpenSea, this development will need to be addressed.
- About the development team
The environment surrounding NFTs is changing at an alarming rate.
This time, our QA team issued a sign-off on the reveal feature, but did not set an expiration date for the sign-off.
Setting a shorter sign-off expiration time (say 24 hours) would prevent features that have gone through the quality assurance process from being in an unintended state when released.
Some other points
Why didn’t we summon the Prophets by refreshing the metadata on the OS, like other NFT projects?
We may have been able to solve the problem by setting Prophet and Spellbook to the same NFT, and refreshing the metadata.
In that case, however, we would have had to release the tokens along with all of the functions from the December release at the time of the initial sale of the Spellbooks.
As we had expected a wide range of functions to be added at the time of the first sale, we arrived at this implementation decision in view of time considerations and future optionality, and thus decided to separate them.
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We hope this little explainer helped to shed some light on what happened last week. We’re as committed as ever to the longevity and sustainability of this project, and look forward to your continued support!
