These days, I’ve been seeing the debate in the secondary market about whether to pay royalties again, and honestly, I feel quite conflicted. On the creator’s side, no royalties feel like being freeloaded; on the trading side, when liquidity tightens, everyone just runs away, and when the pool cools down, it’s even less likely that creators can keep updating. To put it simply, the market only cares about “can it be sold,” not about “should it be supported.”

It’s a bit like the recent disputes over staking and shared security, where layered benefits are stacked beautifully, but in the end, it all comes down to who bears the tail risk. Royalties are the same—no matter how voluntary it is, when the market turns bad, people immediately stop volunteering.

My current approach is pretty simple: when dealing with these projects, I first look at how they design rules so that “neither side feels awkward,” otherwise I’d rather skip a few high-volatility pools to avoid ending up writing a crash review… What I’ve learned isn’t skills, but not to mistake morality for a mechanism.