thirdweb Smart Contracts now support Opensea’s CORI Filter to Enforce Creator Earnings

thirdweb is proud to announce that our NFT contracts now work out of the box with the CORI Operator Filter, supported by Opensea to boost creator earnings enforcement!

As NFTs continue to grow, creators and developers are faced with the challenge of ensuring that they receive their rightful royalties when their work is sold. This is where the Creator Ownership Research Institute’s Operator Filter (CO) comes in.

First introduced by Opensea, the CORI Operator Filter (CO) is a creator earnings enforcement mechanism — built on top of the EIP-2981 NFT royalty standard — that helps bolster the enforcement of creator earnings. With thirdweb's NFT contracts now supporting CO out of the box, creators can rest easy knowing their royalties will be honored and enforced on major marketplaces such as Opensea and others.

The CORI Operator Filter is a mechanism that ensures creators always receive their royalties when their NFTs are sold. If someone attempts to trade a CO-compliant NFT using a marketplace that does not honor creator earnings, the NFT transfer will be blocked. You can find the full list of blocked marketplaces here.

Most of thirdweb's NFT contracts, including NFT drops, NFT collections, edition drops, and edition contracts, now support CO. Support for packs, multiwrap, and signature drop is coming soon. NFTs deployed using these contracts should work seamlessly with Opensea and other major marketplaces that honor onchain-enforced creator earnings, with no extra work necessary.

It's worth noting that this does not apply to contracts deployed before January 2nd, 2023. They will continue to function as before, and Opensea will enforce royalties. If you want to opt-out, you can call the setOperatorRestriction function in your contract from the contract explorer. Just set the _restriction value to false:

This may impact the enforcement of your creator earnings on other NFT marketplaces. Each NFT marketplace has its own policies and guidelines on setting and enforcing creator earnings (royalties). We recommend checking each marketplace's individual policies and guidelines.

If your NFT contract was deployed after January 2nd, 2023, and does not comply with CO, it may impact the enforcement of your creator earnings on NFT marketplaces. For NFT royalties in Opensea, the seller can choose whether and what percentage of the creator earnings they want to pay.

Updating the creator earnings (royalty) percentage on thirdweb does not automatically reflect on OpenSea. OpenSea has its own “Creator Earnings” that you will need to update separately (OpenSea defaults to the contract creator earnings setting via EIP2981, but users have the ability to change it on OpenSea which will write the change to the Royalty Registry).

For more information on CO, you can refer to the official announcement by Opensea. If you have any questions on CO or anything else, feel free to reach out to us. Our team will be happy to help you out!