Another domino has fallen in the growing trend of NFT markets abandoning creative royalties, with Ethereum market LooksRare announcing today that it will no longer require merchants to pay these fees on transactions.

LooksRare stated in a blog post that when merchants sell NFT, "creative royalties will no longer be supported by default," instead allowing buyers to "choose to pay optional royalties." That's a similar approach to Solana's NFT marketplace Magic Eden, which announced its own move to make creator royalties optional earlier this month.

LooksRare, on the other hand, has stated that it will pass 25% of the protocol fee it charges vendors for transacting with their NFTs to creators. LooksRare charges an additional 2% on top of the purchase price, which means that 0.5% of the purchase price will now go to the creators rather than the copyright fees.

Most NFT creators create a royalty that causes a small portion of secondary sales, typically 5-10% of the price, to be automatically sent to the original artist or creator by that market. However, using current NFT standards, these royalties are not fully enforceable on-chain, creating loopholes that some markets exploit to attract traders.

In recent months, markets on Ethereum such as Sudoswap and X2Y2 have removed or made optional creator royalties in response to the ongoing cryptocurrency and NFT bear market.

This effect was most noticeable in Solana, where market leader Magic Eden, which controls approximately 90% of the Solana network, softened and followed other markets. The majority of these moves have occurred in recent weeks, but many NFT artists and creators have spoken out against a "race to the bottom" in denying royalties.

"The expansion of royalty-free markets has eroded general willingness to pay royalties across the NFT domain," LooksRare announced today. "The move away from royalties has eliminated a major source of passive income for most creators, which is good news for marketers."

LooksRare changed the overall trade rewards model on the platform to primarily benefit NFT vendors, in addition to removing necessary royalties from creators and giving them a share of protocol fees. In order to reduce net trading fees for sellers, 95% of token rewards obtained through trading will now go to sellers and 5% to buyers.

LooksRare was launched in January and created quite a stir with a reward model that rewards users with LOOKS tokens and ETH in exchange for trading and using the platform. The market raised billions of dollars in Ethereum NFT trading volume, but it quickly became clear that users were manipulating sales via a process known as flushing.

Flushing occurs in the NFT space when users sell NFTs between their controlled wallets at artificially inflated prices, frequently with the goal of manipulating reward models or increasing the visibility of a specific project. Since the X2Y2 market's launch earlier this year, similar tile game plans have been developed.

In late January, NFT analytics platform CryptoSlam reported that money laundering accounted for approximately 87% of LooksRare's trading volume (over $8.3 billion) to date.

With the launch of newer marketplaces with its own award models, such as the X2Y2 and Blur, LooksRare has lost significant traction over the year. According to DappRadar, LooksRare has processed less than $11 million in legitimate Ethereum NFT transactions in the last 30 days, excluding laundering transactions.

OpenSea, the largest NFT marketplace on all blockchains in terms of trading volume, continues to respect creative copyrights. It has earned $316 million in NFT transactions in the last 30 days, according to DappRadar data.