Reduce Wearables & Emotes Fee to $25: Automate Validation, and Reform Committee

by 0x511a22cdd2c4ee8357bb02df2578037ffe8a4d8d (ginoct)

Linked Draft Proposal

Revise Wearables Fee to 50 USD

Summary

$25/item fee to the DAO; Decentraland Foundation subsidizes $20 per submission for 6 months, so creators pay $5. Automate technical validation via an open-source validator. Curators Committee reduced from 14 to 3, with a fixed monthly stipend.

Abstract

The Pre-Proposal and Draft established the community's mandate to reduce the submission fee. This Governance proposal implements that reduction at $25, with a 6-month Foundation subsidy of $20 per submission that brings the effective creator cost to $5 during the initial ramp, and makes it sustainable through three changes:

• Technical checks move to an open-source automated validator
• The Curators Committee shrinks from 14 to 3 members and shifts its work from per-item review to flagged-item Review and forum-based creator support
• Legal review of flagged items is handled by the Decentraland Foundation Legal team as it's been until now

The validator runs before any fee is charged. Items the validator can't confidently clear (similarity to existing items, possible third-party IP) pause publication and route to legal review before becoming mintable. Once an item is published, the approval is final.

Motivation

The submission fee was introduced as an anti-spam measure and last set at $100 in September 2023. Past attempts to lower it have failed, most notably DAO:de9ce36 (August 2024), rejected 21% / 65%. Those proposals lost because they argued the fee was too high without explaining how the system would pay for itself at a lower number.

This proposal answers that question. The largest cost in the current process is per-item human technical review, and that work is automatable. The Decentraland documentation itself anticipates this transition, noting that human review is necessary "until this approval process can be more fully automated." Automating it lets the fee come down while preserving the curatorial judgment that genuinely matters: flagged-item review and creator support in a leaner, properly compensated form.

The fee is set based on cost and market analysis. Over the last 18 months, 492 new items were published by 128 unique creators: 366 wearables, 119 emotes, and 7 smart wearables. Item revenue was heavily skewed: the median item generated $9.55 in total sales, the 75th percentile generated $61.43, and the average $65.52.

This shows the current $100 fee is highly misaligned with typical item economics. Only 17.5% of items in the sample generated enough sales to recoup the cost. At $50, 30% would break even; at $25, 39%; at $10, 49%. No submission fee can be anchored to median revenue, because the median item does not earn enough to support a meaningful fee. The fee should therefore be understood primarily as a spam deterrent and commitment signal, not as a revenue-maximization mechanism.

A $25 fee is the strongest balance between reducing creator friction and preserving a basic economic filter. It's a 75% reduction on the current barrier while remaining high enough to discourage low-quality submissions. The Foundation's $20 subsidy for the first six months brings the effective creator cost to $5 during the ramp, at which more than half of items in the sample would break even. The DAO should expect lower direct fee revenue per item at current volumes, but we expect reducing the fee will increase that volume. In the end, this proposal intentionally prioritizes ecosystem growth over short-term fee capture.

Expected effects for creators: publishing in minutes rather than days; free iteration on technical rejections; clear, specific error messages instead of human discretion; lower entry friction for new creators; and an auditable rule set anyone in the community can read and contribute to.

A note on buyer protection: Decentraland items are NFTs. Content-policy violations that surface after an item has been minted and traded can't be unwound on-chain. The proposal therefore concentrates review before publication, where the design can actually prevent harm. There is no post-publication fee refund, because such a refund would not help buyers and would create a perverse incentive: publish infringing content, sell copies, recover both the fee and the sales revenue when the item gets pulled.

Specification

1. Automated Validator

The validator enforces the technical acceptance criteria already published in Decentraland's creator docs — geometry, texture, armature, category, bounding box, file format, naming, duplicate detection, plus emote-specific checks. The code is open source, maintained by the DAO through Regenesis Labs; rule-set changes go through open source contribution channels. The validator runs before any fee is charged, so creators iterate freely on technical rejections.

2. Flag and Legal Review

Beyond pass/fail, the validator generates flags in two categories: similarity flags (items above a defined threshold vs. already-published items) and possible-IP flags (patterns that may indicate third-party IP). Flagged items do not publish and are not mintable until cleared.

Flags are reviewed by the Curators Committee and the Foundation legal team, formalizing existing curator escalation practice. The 3-person restructured Committee handles first-pass review; legal counsel is brought in for cases requiring legal judgment.

Each review produces a decision: approved, rejected, or modify published with a brief written rationale on the forum. Creators may request reconsideration within 14 days with new evidence (e.g., licensing documentation).

3. Definitive Approvals

Once an item publishes, the approval is final, and the item is mintable. Post-publication takedowns remain available under existing Content Policy authority: items get delisted in Decentraland and become unusable, but the fee is not refunded and prior NFT sales can't be reversed.

4. Fee Structure

The submission fee is set at $25 USD per item, applied identically to wearables and emotes. The full $25 flows directly to the DAO treasury. No portion is allocated per item to curators or to Catalyst infrastructure — the current $30/item curator allocation is retired in favor of the stipend model in Section 5, and the $10 nominally allocated to Catalysts (which never actually flowed to Catalysts and is Foundation-funded) is acknowledged as not in operation.

For the first six months after cutover, the Foundation subsidizes $20 per validated submission. Creators pay $5 out of pocket; the Foundation transfers the remaining $20 directly to the DAO treasury. After six months, the subsidy ends automatically and creators pay the full $25, unless the DAO renews or restructures through follow-up governance.

5. Curators Committee Restructuring

The Curators Committee is reduced from 14 members to 3, with three responsibilities:

• Flagged-item review — first-pass review of validator-flagged items, alongside legal counsel where needed.
• Creator support on the forum — helping new and small-volume creators interpret validator errors, navigate flag decisions, and learn the publishing process.
• Validator rule-set input — proposing rule updates as Decentraland evolves.

Members are paid a flat monthly stipend in MANA from the DAO treasury. Compensation is deliberately not per item, so pay aligns with the work under the new system rather than throughput.

6. Spam Deterrents

Three layers replace human review as the spam deterrent: the fee itself ($5 for creators during the subsidy period, $25 after); the validator, which catches malformed submissions before any fee is charged; and a per-address rate limit on pending submissions.

Impacts

Creators. Fee drops from $100 to $5 for the first six months (Foundation-subsidized), then to $25 unless the DAO adjusts. Publishing time for technically clean items goes from days to minutes. Rejected submissions cost nothing. Specific, actionable error messages replace human discretion. Flagged items get a 14-day reconsideration window a creator protection that doesn't exist today. Forum mentorship from the restructured Committee continues.

Current Curators Committee. Shrinks from 14 to 3 members. Continuing members keep a defined paid role with a clearer scope and stable monthly compensation. Outgoing members receive a one-time recognition payment for their participation in shaping the validator.

DAO. Per-item revenue drops from roughly $60 (effective DAO portion today) to $25, going directly to the treasury. During the initial 6-month subsidy period, the Foundation covers $20 per submission, so the DAO still receives the full $25 per item while creators only pay $5. Validator development and maintenance are funded by DCL Regenesis Labs; legal review is handled by the Foundation; the DAO treasury funds the curator stipends. Combined with the lower per-item fee, this represents a deliberate DAO investment in creator onboarding at the cost of some short-term fee revenue, with the expectation that lower friction grows submission volume over time.

Foundation. The Foundation takes on two commitments. First, a 6-month subsidy of $20 per validated submission, transferred directly to the DAO treasury during the initial ramp. Second, the legal-counsel role for flagged items is formalized; the Foundation commits available capacity, extending the existing pattern of curator escalations. The Foundation continues to maintain the Content Policy as it is today.

DCL Regenesis Labs. Builds and maintains the validator on the DAO's behalf, and coordinates its implementation with the Decentraland Foundation on the current submission workflows.

Implementation Pathways

Phase 1 — Specification and Curator Selection

Regenesis Labs publishes the detailed technical specification: validator architecture, full rule set with test fixtures, similarity and IP-flag thresholds, the flag-and-review workflow, and integration points with the Builder and content servers.

In parallel, the selection of the 3 continuing Curators Committee members begins. The current 14-member Committee is best positioned to evaluate availability, expertise, historical contribution, working dynamics, and willingness to take on the new scope of work. Selection should therefore be discussed and decided by consensus among current members.

If the current Committee cannot reach consensus on the 3 continuing members within the transition period, the selection moves to the DAO Governance dApp under the Hiring category. In that case, the DAO runs an open selection process for the 3 roles, using the responsibilities defined in Section 5 as the basis for evaluating candidates.

Phase 2 — Build and Shadow Mode

Regenesis Labs builds the validator and deploys it in shadow mode. The current 14-member Committee continues operating under existing rules and fees; the validator runs in parallel and logs decisions. Discrepancies are investigated. Shadow mode continues until validator agreement with curator decisions reaches ≥98% on technical matters over a 15-day rolling window.

Outgoing curators (those not continuing in the restructured 3-person Committee) receive their one-time payment from the DAO treasury for their participation in validating, shaping, and testing the automated validator during the transition.

Phase 3 — Cutover

The validator becomes binding for technical decisions. The new fee structure takes effect: $25 per item to the DAO treasury, with the Foundation contributing $20 per validated submission for the first six months so creators pay $5 during the ramp. The Foundation transfers its $20 contribution directly to the DAO treasury per submission. The per-address rate limit for pending submissions is set at 10 concurrent. The restructured 3-person Committee begins flagged-item reviews and forum creator-support work. Cutover starts the clock on the 6-month subsidy period.

Conclusion

The community has already voted twice to reduce the wearables submission fee. This proposal implements that reduction at $25 to the DAO treasury, with a 6-month Foundation subsidy bringing the effective creator cost to $5 during the ramp, and pairs it with the structural changes that make it sustainable: an open-source automated validator maintained by the DAO through Regenesis Labs, a leaner Curators Committee focused on the work that genuinely needs human judgment, and a clear legal-review path for the cases that warrant it.

The result is a publishing process that's faster, cheaper, and more predictable for creators, hopefully resulting in an increase of wearables and emotes submissions.

This proposal is summarized due to technical limitations. To view it complete and vote on it, visit the DCL DAO Governance dApp