For immediate release:

Call it #sudoSTOP.

The message is clear: Block resale royalties and it’s you who will be blocked.

The Ethereum contract has famously left it to the marketplace to decide whether or not resale royalties are enforced. While platforms like OpenSea honor resale royalties, others like Sudoswap have decided that it will not pay artists what they are contractually owed.

Arsnl is helping the community fight back with the announcement that it will block Sudoswap from its upcoming Frank Stella NFT sale.

Launched this month, Arsnl is the new digital platform from Artist Rights Society (ARS), an organization that has been helping creators for 35 years. ARS represents the intellectual property rights of over 120,000 artists—including Picasso, Kahlo, Rivera, Dali, Wright and Stella himself.

For decades, both ARS and Stella have been fierce advocates of resale royalty. Together, they have lobbied Congress for the passage of the American Royalties Too (ART) Act. Despite the fact that the ART Act has not been passed, NFTs and Blockchain have provided an effective technology for resale rights, enabling creators to be remunerated for sales on the secondary market and for collectors to lend their ongoing support to creators.

With today’s news, Arsnl and Stella join the web3 community in shaping its future. Entitled Geometries, Stella’s NFTs will be coded in a way that prevents them from being traded on the Sudoswap platform, as well as any future marketplace that tries to block artist resale rights.

This is not a final judgment against Sudoswap. If Sudoswap allows for royalties in its smart contracts, Geometries will be made available to their platform.

If members of the community have questions about how to do this yourself, please reach out to hello@arsnl.art.

We encourage fellow artists to share this initiative under the tag #sudoSTOP.