OpenSea Halts Trading on Rihanna Music NFTs

By Kate Irwin

As the internet recovers from Rihanna’s red-hot Super Bowl performance, NFT fans are being frustrated by OpenSea’s decision to halt secondary sales of the NFT collection for her song “Bitch Better Have My Money.”

Last week, Web3 music platform AnotherBlock split 0.99% of the total royalties to the song across 300 Ethereum NFTs. One of the song’s producers, Jamil “Deputy” Pierre, co-produced the Rihanna song in 2015 and brought a percentage of his royalties to the blockchain. It’s unclear to what extent Rihanna herself is aware of the collection’s existence.

The NFT collection—which grants holders of these NFTs a percentage of future streaming royalties from the master recording—quickly sold out last week, generating $63,000 in revenue. But just two days later, a day before Rihanna’s Super Bowl appearance, AnotherBlock CEO Michel “bigmich” Traore reported in the project’s Discord server that users could no longer trade the NFTs on OpenSea, by far the largest NFT trading platform by volume.

On Sunday, the AnotherBlock team said that OpenSea’s automated system had “flagged” the project’s description and delisted the project without notifying the team. AnotherBlock also said that it was unsure why the project was flagged.

“We have used the same or similar language before,” AnotherBlock said of its project’s description in a Discord post.

On Tuesday, AnotherBlock’s Head of Community & Growth Andreas “bigleton” Bigert pasted a response from OpenSea on Discord, explaining that the collection’s sales were halted on the marketplace because OpenSea does not allow NFTs that “appear to be promising fractional ownership and future profit based on that ownership.”

Bigert also claimed that OpenSea has been “ignoring” AnotherBlock’s attempts to resolve the issue.

“We have also brought up why similar collections (Royal.io and Corite for instance) are still tradable on their platform in our communication without getting any comment on that either,” Bigert said Tuesday. Royal.io is a music rights NFT platform launched by electronic musician and entrepreneur Justin “3LAU” Blau, and Corite is another music platform that offers artists revenue sharing with fans and NFTs that grant holders an allocation of its native token.

In AnotherBlock’s Discord server, members were reminded that the Rihanna NFTs were still tradable on AnotherBlock’s own marketplace as well as on Blur, which on Tuesday released its long-awaited airdrop rewards to the delight of wash traders across the NFT space.

But holders have since raised concerns about OpenSea’s restrictions affecting the collection’s “floor” price, which is the minimum purchase price of an NFT in a given collection. 

“Our AnotherBlock traffic is not sufficient,” one holder, kyo1984, argued in the Discord. “Our floor prices and transactions are going down.”

According to AnotherBlock’s marketplace, the collection’s current floor price is 0.55 ETH ($867) at time of writing, a 330% increase from its mint price of 0.128 ETH, which was $210 at the time. Since its launch, the collection has seen just over 155 ETH (about $245,000) in total volume traded.

OpenSea has not yet responded to Decrypt’s request for comment.

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