Over the past couple of days, I’ve been seeing the secondary market arguing about royalties again. To put it simply, everyone wants “liquidity,” but no one wants creators to be cut off from their livelihood forever. When I was trading perps, I acted tough with a soft hand—calling the direction so aggressively—but when it actually came to the key levels, I checked and saw the open interest and funding rate were off, so I stopped out faster than anyone… Then I suddenly felt it’s kind of similar to royalties too: when the market is good, people say they support creators; the moment activity slows down, they start blaming that the trading fees are too high. Later I thought about it and realized how ridiculous it is.

During the airdrop season, task platforms keep getting stricter about anti-bot measures, and the points system has turned the freebie-coupon hunters into people clocking in and out like it’s work—everyone’s calculating input versus output. Then what about creators? If they can’t even protect those small royalties from the secondary market and all that’s left is “post content in exchange for exposure,” who would be willing to do that long-term? Anyway, whenever I see slogans like “0 royalties” right now, I feel a bit on guard: it feels great short-term, but in the long run there may be nothing left to buy. That’s it for now—once this round of arguing is over, I’ll review everything again.