Why choose MOOAR : Empowering creators through royalties

Empowerment is woven into our DNA here at Find Satoshi Lab (FSL).

Throughout the entire lifetime of our company, we’ve always built our products around this value.

• We empower users physically through our Move&Earn app, helping users build healthier and happier lives through walking and running outdoors.
• We also empower users socially by connecting them to others and building digital campfires, helping them move together as a community.
• We’ve even empowered STEPNers charitably by partnering with companies like The Giving Block to launch campaigns like Caring with Crypto; this provided users with the opportunity to support charities they cared about, amplifying their impact and supporting laboratories of effective altruism.

The list goes on. And now, with our latest product launch, the MOOAR NFT marketplace, we’re empowering creators by standing strong with them in the latest Web3 debate over royalties. How are we doing this? Great question — we’ll be digging deep into this today.

The Great Royalty Debate

For those of you who are well-versed in the Web3 space, the “Great Royalty Debate” is nothing new. A characteristic of NFTs, royalties are meant to be embedded as a part of their smart contract.

Why is this such an important discussion? Royalties are payments to the artist (who created the NFT), and enable artists and creators in the space to benefit from secondary sales of their artwork. This has clear benefits that incentivises teams to create communities around creations to add more value to for their members

Here at STEPN, we believe that royalties are core to Web3. That is, royalties are an irrefutable part of the Web3 ethos. They reward creators in perpetuity — providing a financial incentive for their craft for as long as people are valuing their work downstream.

This allows creators to capitalise on their art in a way that was much harder to enable and enforce via traditional means. In theory, Web3 allows creators to directly receive profits from their work, instead of locking them in walled gardens with cumbersome processes and giant corporations, which often results in a considerable cut to their earnings.

However, this year, there has been an unfortunate rise of new marketplaces who aren’t honouring royalties. This is alluring to traders and has started to catch on in popularity because consumers can now eke out greater profits… but who ends up eating the cost? Creators.

This is a troubling and alarming trend. The growing number of marketplaces overriding royalties to pass on savings to traders is in effect disempowering creators and wreaking havoc to the very foundation of the Web3 value equation. And it’s creating a negative feedback loop, where marketplaces who don’t bow into the no-royalty paradigm are seeing their market share dwindle… and inevitably pressured to give in to the growing trend or risk losing out altogether.

Many artists have pointed out that making royalties optional is pretty much a return to Web2 values… basically recreating old systems and setting a dangerous precedent that, if left unchecked, will ultimately lead to the demise of the NFT market as a whole.

Shiti Manghani, COO of FSL, explained:

“What is the point if we again start centralizing the whole platform and start exploiting the creators? On an abstract level, it just doesn’t sit right. If we make systems that are biased against artists while championing decentralisation, what’s the point?”

While marketplaces may benefit short-term from bucking royalties, the long-term consequences of this shift are enormous. But at STEPN, we’ve always played the long game.

And that’s where MOOAR comes in…

Give MOOAR Power Back to the Creators

MOOAR is our new NFT marketplace, sitting alongside STEPN and DOOAR. With MOOAR, there are two key characteristics that set us apart from other NFT marketplaces:

No optional royalties: MOOAR will honour all royalties, with a policy of enforcing 0.5 -10% with a 2% default when creators launch a collection.

We’ve embedded this into our marketplaces because we believe that what attracts buyers and sellers to different NFT platforms boils down to how people see value. And long-term value will be built on platforms that reward creators.

Self-sustaining membership model: Empowering creators doesn’t mean disempowering traders. Both sides of the equation should get maximum value in a well-architected ecosystem.

That’s why we’re pioneering the world’s first membership-based multi-chain NFT marketplace, with a 0% service fee. This is made possible via a USD $29.90/month membership fee that will unlock access to the entire MOOAR product.

This translates into substantial savings. For instance, if you trade a Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) NFT for 60 ETH at a marketplace that charges 2% platform fees, that fee would cover 5 years of MOOAR membership from that transaction alone.

Closing Thoughts

At the end of the day, creators are the backbone of the Web3 world. MOOAR marks the beginning of a new era, not only for our loyal STEPNers, but for all creators in the NFT space. With this new launchpad, we are planting our flag in the ground with creators, standing united with them to ward off attempts to chip away at their profits and rightful earnings. To all Web3 builders and entrepreneurs: we encourage and invite you to do the same.