Zora integrates Splits, enabling artists to collaborate and earn onchain

Zora is a portal to the onchain ecosystem for artists and their supporters. It’s an NFT marketplace that feels more creative than commercial, like an eclectic downtown art gallery — one with an infinite footprint, since the internet is not constrained by city rents.

Zora’s inhouse “imagination studio” recently minted an eloquent expression of the why, what, and how of the platform:

Mission
Create a free and valuable internet.

Vision
An onchain social network designed for the age of imagination.

Strategy
Build the easiest, most rewarding and enjoyable app for creators and collectors to mint.

Hard to improve on that description!

Zora integrated Splits to make it simple for artist collaborators to share their earnings. At the time of writing, nearly 6,000 Splits have been deployed on Zora’s eponymous L2. That number doesn’t include Splits created through Zora-the-website on other networks like Base.

By letting people define how to split their earnings while setting up an NFT edition, Zora has completely automated an otherwise manual and tedious process for artists.

How it works#

Artists can deploy their own Split contracts from within the Zora app while either creating or editing an NFT edition. In either scenario, all you need to do is enter your collaborator's address and the percentage of future income that each address will receive.

When creating a new NFT, expand the “View advanced options” dropdown to configure your Split. Select “Split” as the "Pay out funds to..." option, and then add your collaborators.

Zora provides a comprehensive guide on managing Splits through the Zora app.

Artists are still able to set up more complex payout structures (e.g., recoup expenses before splitting profits, auto-swap into stables before funds are received) by creating them on app.splits.org and pasting those addresses into the "Other wallet" payout field on Zora. However, for more standard splits, this can now be done from within the Zora app directly.

Under the hood#

The Zora engineering team incorporated Splits into their app using our open-source SDK. Once a user enters each recipient's address and their ownership share, the Zora app uses predictImmutableSplitAddress to obtain the Split's address. When the NFT contract is deployed, the Split's address is set as the payoutRecipient on the NFT edition, and the Split is deployed.

After NFTs are minted and the creator decides to withdraw their funds, the money flows through the Split contract before reaching each collaborator. This way, the NFT creator doesn't need to handle accounting or distribute the revenue manually - it's all done automatically behind the scenes.

Additionally, artists who create on Zora now have access to the suite to products offered by Splits, including earning statements, multi-wallet dashboards, email summaries, and more.

Over 500 Split contracts have been deployed on Zora network since they were made available a few months ago. Previously, this required artists to manually create Splits from app.splits.org and paste their contract’s address into the payout field on Zora. This new, native integration makes this process considerably easier for artists on Zora who just want to split revenue from NFT sales.